Specters of Modernity:
“Supernatural Japan” and the Cosmopolitan Gothic
By
Michael Joseph Blouin

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
as partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
American Studies
2012

ABSTRACT
SPECTERS OF MODERNITY:
“SUPERNATURAL JAPAN” AND THE COSMOPOLITAN GOTHIC
By
Michael Joseph Blouin
Value of Research Specialization: From the mid-19th century until today, “Japan” has
frequently been imagined in Western discourse as a supernatural entity; at the same time, Gothic
tales from each nation have been exchanged, consumed, and adapted. By better understanding
this phenomenon, in works ranging from the prose of Lafcadio Hearn and Winnifred Eaton to the
films of Shimizu Takashi, one can better understand the cultural relationship between the two
countries as well as the layers of complexity that accompany constructions of “foreignness.”

Argument of Dissertation: Cosmopolitanism, following Kant, is often articulated through
concepts of unity and rationality. I argue that the cultural exchange between the United States
and Japan in the last century suggests a different kind of cosmopolitanism, one that instead uses
Gothic tropes to interrogate the Self as it projects its own hidden “foreignness” onto distant lands.
This argument builds upon theories of Julia Kristeva, Paul Ricouer, and Jean Baudrillard that
argue for “radical alterity.” In the macabre and spectral visions of one another, the United States
and Japan glimpse the excesses within their modernization.

Contribution of Dissertation: My dissertation expands and changes out current understanding
of the U.S.-Japan cultural relationship, specifically in literature and film. It attempts to challenge
a dominant view that “Japan” has served solely as the Other in Western thought and rather
establishes the manner in which authors and filmmakers have used this theme as an opportunity

to subvert the status quo and interrogate modernity’s excess. The dissertation concludes with an
analysis of Japanese horror films and their American re-makes in order to understand how one
might begin to conceive of a shared affect through revisions of the “uncanny” produced by these
transnational encounters.

Copyright by
MICHAEL JOSEPH BLOUIN
2012

Acknowledgements
A completed dissertation is covered with fingerprints from countless individuals. I would
like to begin by thanking my wife, Kate, for her willingness to help me in every capacity and for
her open-mindedness in moving to Michigan, Japan, and now on to Tennessee. My mother, who
worked tirelessly on my behalf growing up and never wavered in her support of my dreams,
deserves my undying gratitude. In addition, these pages retain traces of tall tales told on the
Connecticut River; my love of a beautiful story certainly comes in large part from Bumpa. Other
family members provided the support and inspiration any dissertation demands, including Nana,
my three talented and hilarious brothers, and my aunt Lellie. Without these loved ones, this
project simply would not exist.
At Michigan State University, I need to thank my committee for their thoughtful
engagement and willingness to write countless letters of support during my tenure as a Spartan.
In particular, Gary Hoppenstand always offered a smile and a word of encouragement while
David Stowe repeatedly went above and beyond the call of duty, purchasing numerous cups of
coffee and offering life-long friendship. Sayuri Shimizu has fought for me and served as a
friendly face in an audience across the Pacific and Scott Michaelsen taught me to appreciate
board games (and continues to teach me a great deal about critical theory). Most importantly of
all, however, I must acknowledge two of my colleagues, Morgan Shipley and Jack Taylor. In
addition to standing by me as incredible friends, and inspiring me to be a better scholar and a
better human being, these two individuals have shared countless laughs, labored alongside me in
journeys through Hegel’s works, and as a result, they have made this project far more compelling.
During my time in Japan, I met incredible individuals, individuals who were selfless and
generous in ways I could never have expected. I am particularly indebted to Kimiko Hiranuma

v

and Miyuki Yamamoto, who took me to Hearn’s home in Matsue and aided me through
numerous moments of being “lost in translation.” Gavin Campbell, a professor at Doshisha
University, provided pointed insight during early drafts and pushed me to sharpen my prose. It
was during his seminar (zemi), in conversation with several graduate students, that this project
really started to take form.
Finally, I must reach further back into the past to recognize the constant influence of
faculty at the University of Vermont. Valerie Rohy forced me to clarify my language and I will
forever be in her debt for her guidance; David Jenemann taught me to appreciate Adorno and to
read cinematic texts in innovative ways; Todd McGowan never failed to startle me with his
wisdom or fuel my creative devices with his provocative debates in the classroom. And, of
course, I owe a great deal to Tony Magistrale – “Coach” – for opening doors, for jogging while
discussing King, and for inspiring me to want to get into this profession in the first place.
This dissertation is therefore an accumulation of ideas and energies borrowed from the
finest individuals I have met in my life. Any success found in the pages to follow cannot be
separated from their influence. Any errors or oversights confirm that I must continue to try and
live up to the high standards they have set.

vi

The world can scarcely have in reserve a less hackneyed theme than Japan.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Was he really a man, a human entity, a personality like ourselves, or was he merely a sort
of spiritual solvent, sent for the moment to precipitate whatever sincerity there was in us,
and show us what the truth was concerning our relations to each other? It was a fantastic
conception, but I thought it was one that I might employ in some sort of romantic design,
and I was professionally grateful for it.
William Dean Howells, A Traveler from Altruria (1894)

Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art,
have any existence? … The whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country.
There are no such people.
Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” (1889)

Then to bed, with drowsy brains harassed with a mad panorama that mixes up pictures of
France, of Italy, of the ship, of the ocean, of home, in grotesque and bewildering disorder.
Then a melting away of familiar faces of cities, and of tossing waves, into a great calm of
forgetfulness and peace. After which, the nightmare.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………...9

Discourses of the Invisible: “Ghosts” and “Spirits” in Early American Japanology………………….39

The Eternal Embrace: Ghostly Maidens in Sidney McCall’s Fiction................................................... 64

“A Soft Shock to the Ego”: Japonisme and the Female Gothic…..………………………………………87

Godzilla is Dead: Nuclear Criticism and a Deferred Reading of the Toho Terror …………………..112

The Gizmo Effect: “Japan Inc.” and the American Nightmare ……………………………………. 134

A Communal Haunt: Spatial and Temporal Ruptures in the Horror Films of Shimizu Takashi………. 157

A Western Wake: Difference and Doubt in Christopher Nolan’s Inception ……………………………191

Notes….………………………………………………… ………………………………………………216

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………..……233

viii

Introduction
Upon spending a year abroad in Japan, I hoped to understand better why a surprisingly
large number of individuals in the last century elected to adapt ghostly tales from the archipelago.
Of the countless books concerning U.S.-Japan cultural relations, there is no work treating this
subject at length – which I found disconcerting, as the phenomenon was as prevalent as any other.
There are fascinating adaptations of Japanese superstitions from the late nineteenth century,
monstrous visions of a petulant nuclear lizard, and iconic females with long, black hair; gazing
out the window from the train rumbling into Kyoto station, I desired to begin to understand why
these creepy imports from the Far East had been consistently popular throughout the past
hundred years and what important transnational connections were running beneath the surface of
these particular texts.
As I read over my correspondences from my time in Japan, a narrative mirroring the
trajectory of this dissertation appears. During my early days in rural Omihachiman, I expressed a
belief I will eventually discover a deeper meaning in the country. My words then slowly began to
suggest self-doubt; I ruminated on how my comprehension of “Japan” and “America” was
gradually being challenged by my experiences. At a certain point, while gazing up at Matsue
castle in the morning fog from the very same path Gothic storyteller Lafcadio Hearn walked
daily, I uncovered a possible reason as to why these haunting tales repeatedly manage to move
the reader, which forms a basic premise for this project: at first, an enigmatic aesthetic lures the
weary traveler into contemplation and a search for invisible forces. Subsequently, from within
the mist, one finds the outline of intangible pieces of themselves repressed at home. After the
twelve month stay comes to a close, while sitting in the Kansai International Airport and writing
in my well-worn notebook, I deliberate further on this encounter: “Maybe my shifting attitudes

9

suggest why supernatural images from Japan have played such a prominent role in Western
discourse.”
“Japan,” as it is oft- imagined by Western visitors and artists who appropriate the nation’s
fantastic stories, recurrently evokes a sense of the uncanny. In these cases, one’s internal
incomprehensibility is readily projected outward onto narratives of the archipelago, giving the
texts an eerie unfamiliarity in conversation with the shockingly familiar. As my companions and
I stared up at the ghostly outline of the castle, I thought of Hearn - and I considered how
terrifying, and exhilarating, it must have been for him to recognize his spectrality among
phantoms lingering in a distant land.
“Supernatural Japan”: A Survey
Western relations with Japan have historically involved an air of the supernatural. When
Commodore Matthew Perry arrived off of Japanese shores in July of 1853, he came aboard ships
painted midnight black, known in Japanese as kurofune, a sight meant to intimidate and to give
the isolated country a glimpse of America’s “transcendent power.” An exchange aboard Perry’s
fearsome vessels was later accompanied by the trail of Haley’s comet, illuminating the
1

mesmerized onlookers below. One can only imagine the sort of macabre tales that could have
been told of these initial, fantastic moments had authors Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman
Melville, each of whom possessed an affinity for the unnerving, agreed to Perry’s request to
accompany him upon his voyage. Nevertheless, from the opening of Japan’s ports in the middle
of the nineteenth century, discourse between the two cultures has returned time and time again to
titillating sensations of a supernatural sort.
Upon first glance, the predominance of these tropes in the cultural representation of
“Japan” is easily comprehended. It is, one could argue, yet another example of what critic
10

Edward Said labels as Orientalism. Eager to establish a power dynamic with the archipelago,
Western audiences delight in transforming the complex country into a set of exotic symbols
signifying the primitive, the “Unknown,” the completely “irrational.” Undoubtedly, there is an
element of Orientalism running throughout the works to be analyzed and it is necessary to
continue recognizing this trend. However, this model of analysis is not sufficient in the face of
what I believe to be a more complex phenomenon. Said himself admitted that his employment of
the term Orientalism should not be applied loosely to the Far East, as the relationship between
Japan and the United States is based on a distinctly different power dynamic. First, the
transnational flow does not readily align with a center-periphery model; rather, Japanese artists
and thinkers, including film director Shimizu Takashi, have consistently interjected, opening
opportunities for Western figures to re-imagine their own culture in the process. Additionally, it
would be disingenuous to characterize the Western authors and filmmakers in the pages to follow
as solely “idealistic travelers” or “anxious racists.” Through the interweaving of visions of
“Japan” with narrative forms privileging fear and doubt, these figures struggle to negotiate a dual
impulse within America’s long twentieth century: the excesses of national expansion with a
lingering suspicion that, repressed beneath the surface of this figurative and literal expansion,
“foreignness” exists within themselves. In short, “supernatural Japan” offers spectators an
unfamiliar culture onto which the grotesque side of modernization can be made manifest.
This trend depends on a vast amount of artifacts, beyond the terrain of the literary and
cinematic. Following Perry’s expedition, and the brief window during which American was
engaged in a Civil War and Japan was undergoing a painful transition away from feudal
governance, curios from the archipelago became enormously popular in Western markets.
Disenfranchised Westerners found in this commercialized Far East an opportunity to vent their
11

2

displeasure with the state of Western affairs. In the process, they found alternative methods and
initiated ad hoc amalgamations of artistic styles from around the globe. One brand of
amalgamation interweaves Gothic fancies with Japanese subject matter. As the “Japan Idea”
entered into the Western lexicon, it hybridized with familiar narrative conventions, including one
of the most prevalent, the Gothic (and later, the horror film).

3

British artists Sidney Sime and Aubrey Beardsley were two of the first to seize upon the
Gothic undertones they found in Japanese art forms in order to react against the oppressiveness
4

of Western thought. Sime generated images to accompany Lord Dunsany’s Orientalist fictions,
as well as the publications of infamous Orientalist William Hearst, utilizing Japanese images as
5

exotic material with which to cast a “weird atmosphere.” Aubrey Beardsley, on the other hand,
privileging decadence over realism, painted unsettling images based upon his impressions of
“Japan,” which granted him “release from the bondage of what we call real things” (Beardsley,
xii). Sime’s “The Dirge of Shimono Kani” (from Dunsany’s Time and the Gods, 1906) and
Beardsley’s “The Mysterious Rose Garden” (from The Yellow Book, Vol. IV, 1895) are two
pointed examples of these artists drew from Japanese ukiyo-e prints from the Edo period (1600 –
1868) being heavily imported into Western sitting rooms. These particular paintings are stylized
as woodblock prints and, in contrast to a traditional Western vanishing point perspective, remove
depth to create a sense of flatness, coupled with a sense the subjects are floating in space. They
are placed in a mystical frame to contain “Japan” as outside of the natural world. In Beardsley’s
image, a Japanese demon figure whispers into the ear of an Eve-like female. “Japan,” through a
mixture of eroticism, reactions against Western logic, and a sense of enticing danger, takes shape
through fantastic dreams.

12

These initial depictions of “supernatural Japan” cannot be divorced from their political
context. Imagining the Far East through its ghosts and monsters has been repeatedly wed to
government propaganda. At the turn of the century, M.P. Shiel produced “The Yellow Trilogy,”
a series of novels concerning the “yellow peril,” an anxiety Asians were plotting to take over the
world. At the same moment, in Ireland, Lord Dunsany, well-known author of dark tales, was said
to have drawn inspiration from playwright David Belasco’s “The Darling of the Gods” (1903), a
play which presents “Japan” as a land of torment and divine terrors. Dunsany’s fiction, like
Belasco’s staging, presents an aura of “Oriental mystique” to accomplish the affect. Elsewhere
during this era, perhaps most well-known of all, science fiction writer H.G. Wells channeled his
distrust of Asian races in his fictional worlds. Wells’ The War in the Air (1908) terrifies the
audience with a relentless menace looming over the Western front, “The Confederation of
Eastern Asia.” More subtly, Wells’ story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1895) tells of a
Western protagonist who attempts to grow a flower from the Orient - the exotic flower signifying
the region in Western popular culture. The vampiric weed demonstrates “unexpected mimicry,”
eventually attacking and nearly killing its unsuspecting owner, a despicable deed loosely
disguising public fears of a secretive invasion by Asian legions. During the Pacific War, the
6

anxiety towards “a yellow peril” grew ever-more pronounced. In Black Dragons (1942),
starring horror mainstay Bella Legosi, six powerful Americans were replaced by diabolical
Japanese imposters seeking to invade America from the inside. The film, though unconsciously
playing on existential distrust among individuals on the home front, sums up the perceived
problem by representing “Japan” as sneaky, cunning, an evil force with the ability to mimic
Westerners and lull them into a false sense of security in order to destroy them.

13

7

Employing depictions as one-dimensional as those describing a “yellow peril,” a number
of figures utilize “supernatural Japan” to re-establish moral parameters for what they perceive to
8

be an increasingly secular world. Alice Mabel Bacon was an educator who helped develop a
school in Japan for women; she later capitalized on her time there, and her interaction with
Japanese students, to compose a collection of short stories, some of which she openly
acknowledges to be adaptations of Hearn’s publications. This collection, In the Land of the
Gods: Some Stories of Japan (1905), reflects her upbringing as the daughter of a well-known
pastor and professor at the Yale Divinity School. Multiple tales involve a protagonist who sins,
wandering into the land of the kitsune (fox) and losing their way from the metaphorical path.
In “The Independence of Saburo,” Saburo is a worker who has grown tired of the
working lifestyle, a product of Japan’s rapid modernization, “measuring and counting and
writing out bills until it seemed to him that he could bear it no longer” (Bacon, 89). His first sin
is abandoning the “unvarying monotony of the shop” and stealing off into a nearby rustic
mountainside. He then comes upon a beautiful maiden, who he quickly tries to take with him
back into the city, which he deems boastfully to be a “better place.” Succumbing to a second sin
of pride, Samburo wanders into the woman’s hut. The atmosphere quickly grows macabre.
Contact with the rational world of business has been lost and he vanishes into a world of decay
and death. He discovers the girl he has been pursuing is actually a corpse: “The dead, raising her
head, hitched forward across the floor. Saburo backed again. Once more the thing moved toward
him, and once more he backed. It came closer, - closer -” (102-103). The story concludes with
the young man fleeing home to the safety of his shop. “’I have returned’, he said, as he bowed to
his parents. Then he went back to his measuring stick, his soroban, and his account books” (104).
His moral lesson resonates as if drawn from one of Bacon’s contemporaries, Horatio Alger Jr.: a
14

life of humble labor, and filial piety, Bacon reminds the reader, is the only way to avoid the
horrors of an “anti-modern nightmare.”
Bacon adapts another tale which re-affirms faith in the modernization she envisions
taking place in “Japan”: “Chokichi’s Pilgrimmage,” adapted from Hearn’s “Mujina” (itself
adapted from an older Japanese tale). While Hearn’s version, as we will explore at greater length
in the first chapter, permits the reader to be startled by pure sensation, in direct opposition to the
realism occupying much of Western literature at the fin-de-siecle, Bacon re-affirms a sense of
industrial fortitude. Chokichi’s economic woes frame the narrative in the form of the arrival of
his bills and his need “to satisfy his creditors” (133). He decides to seek help from the gods,
wandering off into the wilderness. As in “The Independence of Samburo,” the woods signifies
“Old Japan,” a way of life now outside of the purview of a modernized archipelago. At this point
in Hearn’s abbreviated version, the traveler meets a woman by the roadside who has no face,
symbolically representing for Hearn the absence of meaning at the heart of the narrative as well
as the senselessness of using literary calculations to find redemptive Truth. In contrast, Bacon’s
young woman reveals herself to have not an absent face, but a demonic one: “A yell of demon
laughter was in the air. He looked up to see that his companion has grown to the height of a giant,
and was staring at him with terrible eyes from monkey face” (146). Unlike what I will later
analyze as Hearn’s proto-modernist style, Bacon’s tale provides an “authentic” monster to fear,
lurking in the wilderness of immorality.
Further down the road, Bacon’s protagonist encounters a man with the same terrible face.
It is here Hearn concludes his version, providing his reader with the chill of an abrupt ending,
leaving them unsure of what to make of the impasse. Contrastingly, Bacon’s version continues
past the second encounter and allows her protagonist to return home and make sense of the
15

circuitous monstrosity. He affirms a lesson learned: “If a man would see his business prosper, let
him mind it himself, nor clamor to the gods for aid” (149). The plot allowing Hearn to expose an
abyss hiding beneath the tediousness of Western society affords Bacon a different opportunity to remind her readers that escaping into the dreams of a vanishing past will simply not pay the
bills in an industrial age.
A contemporary of Bacon, William Elliot Griffis likewise appropriates supernatural tales
from Japan in order to adapt moral parables from Christianity. Griffis spent four years as an
educator in the countryside while advocating for the “progress” of the archipelago. One of his
stories, “Little Silver’s Dream” (1908), advocates a life of diligent toil freed from sinful action.
In the tale, a Japanese girl fantasizes about travelling on a boat ghosts are trying desperately to
sink. These anti-progressive specters are unsuccessful, however, as the forward-moving sailors
continue to hand them ladles without bottoms. Further on, they come to an island with “wizenfaced folks” donning grotesque leather features, long reddish-gray hair, and protruding barnacles
about their visage. The howling primates enjoy their liquor a bit too much and subsequently
squander their life’s fortune. The girl awakens, the type of “waking” that will re-appear later in
cyberpunk depictions of the archipelago (see chapter 7), having moved past the false promises of
an illusory realm: “She laughed to think how they had all their work a-dipping for the water for
nothing. But she never forgot the Demon’s treasure – house of lost gold and happiness, whenever
she saw anyone drinking more than was good for him” (Griffis 2008, 31). Moralizing therefore
appears in late nineteenth century fictions portrayals of “Japan” as frequently as depictions of a
“yellow peril.” What binds the two trends is their reliance on stylized phantoms and that each
retain “supernatural Japan” as a fantastic space which, despite its unbelievable qualities, provides
a valuable service to the reader in a presumed quest for self-improvement. Representations of an
16

exterior for Western boundaries, located in the Far East, combines sentiment previously evoked
by religious texts as well as early Gothic literature by harkening fear and trembling in the face of
a hellish “Unknown.”
Yet, unlike Bacon, Griffis on occasion pauses to reflect upon the difference between
ethnography and fanciful dreaming. In the preface to his widely-read The Mikado’s Empire
(1883), Griffis writes: “It is time that a writer treated Japan as something else than an Oriental
puzzle… it is time to drop the license of exaggeration” (Griffis 2006, xi). At this time, the
recorded history of “Japan” was entangled with the legends and myths being imported to
9

Western galleries and book shops. Griffis recognizes this as a potential problem but remains
ambivalent in his response.
Griffis never seems to recognize fully his alignment with the puzzle-makers. With no hint
of irony, he begins his Japanese fairytale collection by acknowledging “some (of the tales) were
suggested by native custom, and artist’s pictures, while others were spun from my own brain.
But all of them, I feel sure, reflect the spirit of Old Japan” (Griffis 2008, preface). This is likely
due in some part to Griffis’ obsession with his finances, as his letters to sister Margaret Clark
Griffis demonstrate.

10

It was marketable to produce a book about the “ghostly” features of the

Far East. In order to do so, certain ethical aspects of ethnography had to be suspended. While
staying in Japan, Griffis grew aware of his literary talents and started to stray from his roots
pontificating upon Christian principles. In his study Mirror in the Shrine, Robert Rosenstone
cites Margaret’s prediction William “will not be a minister… he wants to be a literary man”
(Rosenstone, 195). Griffis walked an ever-finer line between faithful depictions of the Japanese
11

people as he saw them and the aestheticized phantoms recycled to sell works of fiction.

17

With

his inability to reconcile the two, Griffis foundationally prefaces the uncertainty marking
twentieth century stories of the macabre exchanged between the two cultures.
It is even more clearly in the now forgotten adaptations of James S. De Benneville one
recognizes the powerful contradictions at work in rendering “Japan” as a supernatural entity. His
two volume work, Tales of the Tokugawa (1921), at first appears in the vein of Bacon and Griffis.
From the tales of a newly-encountered nation, one can derive universal values such as loyalty,
dedication, and the sinfulness of a wasted life. But the excesses de Benneville points towards are
bloodier than what serves, for Bacon and Griffis, as a “bloodless,” didactic enterprise. Stemming
from the atmospherics of ukiyo-e depictions of the grotesque, de Benneville relishes in the chaos
these tales offer stiff Western literary circles with a long-standing history of resisting such
12

unruliness.

De Benneville’s adaptations create multiple layers within the narrative in order to decenter the Western reader. Rokuzo, one of the multiple narrators in “Bakemono Yashiki” (“The
Haunted Mansion”), reveals the disruption offered to a cohesive and linear modernity as “past
fact and present fancy become strangely mixed in his recital” (De Benneville 2007). In his nonfiction account of his travels, de Benneville elaborates on the potential he finds in an imaginary
“Japan”: the Western subject believes he is “the favoured child of History” but modernity,
through its rigorous scientific de-bunking, starts “to break down unaware the divinityship lodged
in our skulls” (De Benneville 2010, 336). The process arrives at its logical conclusion in
unsettling travels to a dream “Japan”: “Wandering in the mazes of their own perplexities,
unwilling to accept their limitations… such men are often driven in their imitations to measure
the infinite by the finite” (338). The “infinite” found is not a “finite” moral lesson, as with Bacon,
Griffis, or espousers of a “yellow peril,” but instead “an almost dramatic hopelessness of our
18

situation before these abysmal depths of Space and Time” (339). This Gothic dismay produces
imaginary “Japan” as a literary space for contemplating the limits of rationality as well as the
scope of modernization.
In short, early attempts to contain the idea of “Japan” in supernatural terms regularly
exceed, on some level, the confines of the artistic form used to do so. It is from this unrest the
specters of modernity we will analyze in the pages to follow are predicated. This dissertation
addresses neither images of a “yellow peril” nor didactic adaptations at length, opting rather to
focus on texts developing a “supernatural Japan” to negotiate a particular Western identity from
less certain waters.13 I argue that as one moves past the preliminary sketches I have hereto
examined, based more prevalently on positivist commentaries, one will locate how uniquely
twentieth century literary and cinematic variations on the Gothic complicate this phenomenon.
Before moving on to an overview of my theoretical approach, I would like to turn briefly to a
generally unknown story that, as with the tales of de Benneville, helps to move one into the
context of the past hundred years, Frank Emory Bunts’ “A Japanese Hell” (1916). This tale
illuminates profound doubts accompanying representations of “supernatural Japan” and unveils
anxieties running deeper than Orientalist dread of the “foreign” or trepidation concerning
increased moral turpitude.
“A Japanese Hell” departs from early Gothic form and pivots, like Henry James and his
use of spectral materials during this era, into contemplation of narrative unreliability in Western
discourse more generally. This stylistic decision reflects a shift in literature as well as attitudes
toward Japan. The plot is relatively simple: a first person narrator visits Japan with military
friends. His view of Mount Fuji is accompanied by “feelings of pleasure, wonder, amazement,
awe – yes, even of reverence” (Bunts, 62). Near the foot of the mountain, they decide to explore
19

the ominous caverns beneath. Before entering the mouth, the narrator ironically mocks nearby
Japanese who are paying homage to the holy mountain as “ignorant idolators” (63). The
narrator’s recognition of the sublime aura of the place, at odds with his dismissal of the native
inhabitants, establishes his ambivalence at the opening of the tale.
This oscillation between Gothic sensation and the constraints of rational thought in
Bunts’ tale reveals broader tensions in depictions of a “supernatural Japan.” While exploring, the
protagonist becomes lost in a disquieting series of tunnels, encountering grotesqueries and
gradually losing his grip on reality. He meets two Japanese men who are decomposing in graphic
fashion: “He lay with those green snakes crawling over him, writhing about his neck, protruding
their long shiny heads into his open mouth” (68). Upon later recalling his engagement with the
rotting fellows, the narrator admits fear but immediately negates it as a minor dropping of his
guard: “(The Japanese) relied upon the strange sights and surroundings to aid him in making me
believe what I should have scouted and laughed at had I been safe above ground” (70). The
narrator experiences “Japan” as a nightmarish landscape he must refuse, and contain, as mere
illusion. His frightened spells, during which confidence is momentarily evacuated, repeatedly
exposes doubt and then routinely refutes the response.
Bunts’ narrative form summons a “supernatural Japan” to call into question the narrator’s
reliability. The narrator’s representations of “Japan” as a malicious peril are made dubious by the
calculated medium of the story. He draws attention to how he pieces together details from
admittedly “a blank” and includes superfluous details (“Not that this has any particular
connection with the adventure that I am about to relate”) as well as elements reminiscent of
Edgar Allan Poe’s monomania, assurances for the reader - and himself - he is in fact telling the
truth: “I feel justified in saying that I have always enjoyed a good reputation for veracity, and I
20

have not been willing to risk injuring it by relating what may, to some, appear improbable and
incredible” (65). Upon returning to the surface, the narrator expresses guilt at leaving the
decomposing men behind, trying desperately to justify his actions: “Fallacious reasoning, you
say? Oh, no! It cannot be, and yet, the horror of it” (69). One recognizes the influence of Poe and
James in following a mind turned against itself. Recognizing a loss of control over his reality, the
narrator tries desperately to explain the event in reasonable terms, assuming the Japanese
government is probably burying “inconvenient” persons alive in the caves. This warning of a
“yellow peril” stands as absurd when one considers the narrator’s neurosis. It is too late for the
narrator to create a comforting version of cultural difference; all renderings of the archipelago,
be they of supernatural or man-made, are viewed with heavy skepticism. The reader likely agrees
with the narrator’s assessment of his recollection: “I was afraid they would think my brain
affected by suffering” (75).
Bunts’ style echoes a broader transformation of Gothic fiction during the early 1900s.
George Haggerty, examining James’ contributions to the genre, argues “what is truly horrifying
about human experience… is that the subjective is the only objectivity we can know” (Haggerty,
154). The “Japan Idea,” already constituted as “supernatural” by a number of widely-read
14

authors since the mid-nineteenth century, underwent a similar turn.

As “A Japanese Hell”

demonstrates, in a time of tremendous expansion outward, with transnational traffic crowding
Pacific routes, there was an equally dizzying movement inward. Cultural forms accompanying
modernization, including the Gothic and the “Japan Idea,” gradually raised doubts about the
validity of any individual’s cosmopolitan vision. Presumed ethnographic mastery is thus undone
in these narratives by the psychological claustrophobia of modernity. What haunts from foreign
sources cannot be separated from the corrupt mental apparatus of the Western subject. It is from
21

this critical transformation one can begin to interrogate the complexities underlying an imagined
“Japan” over the course of the past hundred years.
Therefore, while never losing sight of the one-dimensional didactic tales and racist
depictions lingering even today, the dissertation will follow Bunts’ lead and focus instead on
complications within later twentieth century depictions. In one respect, “Japan” is portrayed as
the fulfillment of Enlightenment promises (a unification of “East/West”); in another respect, and
at the same moment, “Japan” represents everything outside of the Enlightenment project, its
unseen or refused elements. In this light, “Japan” occupies a rather unique position in relation to
American culture. Since the Meiji Restoration (1868), the country has been understood as
capable of adopting Western modes of modernization, of being “like Us,” while retaining an aura
of absolute difference. This attendant uncanniness urges spectators to recognize a reflection of
themselves in these narratives while disturbing them with a Conradian absence found at the heart
of modernity.
A Cosmopolitan Gothic
To understand better the unique brand of cosmopolitanism utilized by figures exploring
“Japan” as established by the horror expressed by Bunts’ tale, one must first define the style
these figures were adopting (and reacting against). Cosmopolitanism has held various meanings
since the age of the Stoics, who first considered the concept of becoming a “world citizen.” The
subject, with what scholar Mary Louise Pratt labels a “view from nowhere,” envisages other
cultures to absorb their unique perspectives, to attain a sort of carte blanche vantage point over
the rest of the globe. In 1784, German philosopher Immanuel Kant composed an influential
treatise, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” which seeks to

22

interconnect world states by identifying a priori moral grounding. His Utopian vision contends
Western rationalism, a particular notion flaunting its universality, to be at the center of the
matter: “A universal cosmopolitan existence, will at last be realized as the matrix within which
all the original capacities of the human race may develop… aimed at a perfect civil union of
mankind” (Kant, 51). This optimistic vision for the future has recently been re-kindled by noted
political scholar Martha Nussbaum, who detects a focal point of world development radiating
outward. She writes, “We think of ourselves not as devoid of local affiliations, but as surrounded
by a series of concentric circles” (Nussbaum, 9). For Kant and Nussbaum, cosmopolitanism
presents a unifying notion, one privileging an accumulation of understanding towards total
interconnection. A priori, it “offers only reason and the love of humanity” (15).
An influential example of these concentric circles being applied to renderings of “Japan,”
Walt Whitman’s poem “A Broadway Pageant,” published in the New York Times in 1860, gushes
about the universal love the poet perceives fusing “East and West.” The first Japanese envoy to
visit Manhattan gave cause for elaborate spectacle; Whitman observed the procession from his
apartment above the street. “The sign is reversing, the orb is enclosed / the ring is circled, the
journey is done” (Whitman, 52). Cosmopolitanism allows the poet to contemplate a
transcendental unity in the perceived arrival of “Japan” on the world stage. He sings of a
passionate embrace and a bursting forth of his individuality amidst rapturous liberty, personified
as “Libertad.” The spectacle prompts Whitman to express the particularities of his nationalism –
individualism, freedom, democratic vistas – as an idealized universal.
Contemporary critics of this kind of cosmopolitan idealism have been numerous. Theorist
Karl-Otto Apel points out this version of cosmopolitanism is too narrow and relies solely on
dangerous presuppositions, noting “human attempts to realize the goals of reason can be
23

achieved only to the extent that they are pre-determined through some causal mechanism within
the continuous chain of the determination of nature” (Apel, 89). The risk of a cosmopolitanism
based purely on the precepts of Western rationality, according to Apel, is that the particularities
of specific regions will be sacrificed in the name of the universal. In other words, a forced,
abstract unity could be employed to disguise the cultural myths distinguishing “Us” by
precluding any of the beneficial uncertainty stemming from global interaction. In response to
Nussbaum’s Kantian position, Gertrude Himmelfarb admits: “Cosmopolitanism has a nice, highminded ring to it, but it is an illusion, and, like all illusions, perilous” (Nussbaum, 77). For these
critics, twentieth century writers who consider Japan, to adopt its philosophies or adapt its
folklore, may lose sight of their confines and instead attempt to transform Western traditions into
a singular World tradition. The didactic undertones of Griffis and Bacon add to this concern.
Cultural studies scholar Timothy Brennan recognizes within this intellectual crisis “the explicit
failure to see cosmopolitanism as less an expansive ethos than an expansionist policy: a move
not toward complexity and variety but toward centralization and suffocating stagnation”
(Brennan, 55).
Seeking to redeem cosmopolitanism and make sense of this stagnation, theorist Julia
Kristeva illuminates the Gothic undertones of the phenomenon as an avenue for linking
psychoanalysis overtly to global politics. She contends the self-critique involved in recognizing
“foreignness” exposes one’s desire for self-destruction, a liberation (again, a Gothic refrain) from
the constraints of the “hyper-rational.” She finds here “a disseminated ‘oneself’” and insists one
longs for exposure to “foreigners” and delights in becoming “foreign” (Kristeva 1991, 34).
Authors Hearn and Winnifred Eaton find similar psychoanalytical potency in their encounters.
Kristeva writes,
24

The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there
are no foreigners… a cosmopolitanism of a new sort that, cutting across
governments, economies, and markets, might work for a mankind whose
solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconscious – desiring,
destructive, fearful, empty, impossible. (192)
Kristeva anticipates a longing to break apart one’s cultural identity, to lose the Self in the
impossibility of the Other. I will maintain that her recognition of the all-or-nothing impulse
driving cosmopolitanism mirrors the impulse driving many Gothic narratives: “cosmopolitanism
will be either libertarian or totalitarian – or else it will not be” (61). A sway between allconsuming rationality and the freedom of chaos always-already at work, even in the writings of
Griffis and Bacon, sits embedded within Kristeva’s definition of cosmopolitanism. Her need to
appreciate cosmopolitanism’s designation of a radical alterity, outside of oppressive modern
paradigms, converges with a number of critical theorists who lend their voice to this dissertation.
Unity, for Kristeva, is detached and cold when placed in the rubric of a pre-determined Western
system. Echoing these concerns, commentator Michael McConnell views Nussbaum’s
cosmopolitanism as “too bloodless to capture the moral imagination” (Nussbaum, 79). This
interjection rests at the center of my argument: the authors in question utilize Gothic sensation to
make once again bloody the “bloodless” task of cosmopolitanism, the beating of the individual
and collective heart, the shock of eroding cultural distinctions made manifest in a haunted Far
East.
These Gothic musings are not a complete departure from Western, specifically American,
discourse over the past century. Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S.

25

Culture outlines the integration of doubt into American identity, as a potential imperial force,
from the late nineteenth century onward:
Anarchy becomes an integral and constitutive part of empire, central to the
representation of U.S. imperialism in dispersed locations and at different
historical moments. Anarchy is conjured by imperial culture as a haunting specter
that must be subdued and controlled, and at the same time, it is a figure of
empire’s undoing. (Kaplan, 13)
Analyzing Gothic moments in the travel writings of authors such as Mark Twain, Kaplan
recognizes widespread ambivalence in various attempts to contain the “American domain.”

15

Meanwhile, as American writers took to the seas, they confronted a desire to contain, and
consume, the “foreignness” of the Other while still associating these findings with universal
values presumed to be radiating outward from the Self. As Kaplan demonstrates, these two
objectives remain eternally at odds and, indeed, have become “constitutive” of America’s
imperial pretense. Thus a certain type of Gothic unrest remained at the forefront of American
thought as the nation stretched beyond its Western boundaries and into the unto-then isolated
ports of Japan.
Ralph Adams Cram, famous for his Gothic designs of college campuses across the United
States, was initially inspired by the ambivalence he faced during his four-month sojourn to Japan.
His interpretations highlighted a Gothic unrest by overtly juxtaposing rational design with an
“irrational mysticism” in his recordings of the country. While visiting in 1898, he spent time
with both Hearn and Ernest Fenollosa. The dynamic picture of the nation he creates probably
owes much to his discussions of the archipelago alongside two distinct world outlooks;

26

Fenollosa’s cosmopolitan idealism, based on a Greek iconography, and Hearn’s modernist
Gothicism, based on models of late Romantic uncertainty (for more, see chapter 1). Cram’s
Impressions of Japanese Architecture (1905) offers one an example of the dynamism essential to
Gothicism. Initially, following Fenollosa, he depicts the architecture of the country as wellproportioned and as a tremendous depiction of the human Spirit: “Greek architecture finds its
echo in Asia” (Cram 2010, 98). Still, amidst frequent references to the enlightened aura of
Greece, Cram conveys his personal favorite, the Gothic, an affinity he shared with Hearn: “There
is no difference but one of degree between the arts of Japan and those of medieval Europe” (111).
He departs from the tempered, bourgeoisie manifestations of Greek revivalism to celebrate the
organic sensationalism he finds in Japanese temples, “a spiritual import that is quite
overpowering. They breathe mysticism and abstraction, they are dreamlike and visionary” (59).
In the pages of Impressions of Japanese Architecture, Cram locates a philosophical crossroads
emerging in fin-de-siecle Western nations between Greek and Gothic styles, those espousing
rationality against a reactionary return to primal urges. Cram describes “Japan” within a specific
contest over how Western artists will respond to modernization via tales of cultural “progress”
overseas.16
The Gothic thus plays a major role in shaping American cosmopolitanism, in particular,
as it manifests itself in representations of “Japan.” The genre remains of the utmost importance
to American literature and its depictions of a shifting geographic and intellectual frontier.

17

It

can be argued Gothicism and cosmopolitanism have been tied up in concurrent mappings of
“America.” Attitudes toward Otherness, whether Salem women, Native Americans, slaves, or the
natives of distant lands, has defined American culture since well before 1776. On one hand, there
is a fascination with what repulses the cosmopolitan – in early travelogues of those passing
27

through Japan, this was Japanese food and superstition. On the other side, there is pleasure in
shedding the burden of national identity, complete with its rationalist baggage, and revel in
alleged differences.

18

As just one example, Charles Longfellow, son of famed American poet

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was a “globe-trotter” who donned traditional Japanese costume
and engaged in what some would call “inappropriate dalliances” while living abroad in Japan.
The American Gothic fosters Kristeva’s perceived duality, between the detached consumption of
19

“foreignness” versus a wholesale adoption accompanied by a complete loss of inhibition.

The Gothic, I argue, intimately binds itself to the paradoxes of cosmopolitanism. One
might argue their competing impulses are fed by the same spring. Critic Noel Carroll’s wellknown cognitivist reading of the genre evokes a subtle but definitively cosmopolitan mission:
“Whatever distress horror causes, as a probable price for our fascination, is outweighed for the
average consumer by the pleasure we derive in having out curiosity stimulated and rewarded”
(Carroll, 193). The pleasures of horror, for Carroll, stem from the base human instinct to go
outside and encounter difference. One finds a thrill in the shadowy beyond, whether the forests
of Massachusetts or the temples of Japan, going out in search of an amorphous entity and
whatever one finds, be it a well-defined supernatural being or a realization they themselves are
projecting internal guilt, there is pleasure in the process. Following Carroll’s logic,
cosmopolitanism and the Gothic, on a fundamental level, are driven by a ceaseless projection and
probing of a never-reified self-consciousness.
The Gothic objectifies the monstrous Other and the Self in Western discourse in order to
break apart narrowly-confined subjectivities. Eric Savoy locates in the genre “the negation of
national imagery” (Savoy, 11); Rosemary Jackson, examining the closely-knit genre of fantasy,

28

adds that the genre “functions to subvert and undermine cultural stability” (Jackson, 69). In brief,
while Kant and Nussbaum respectively appreciate an abstract, “bloodless” universality, I will use
the term cosmopolitan Gothic – specifically in reference to representations of “Japan” over the
long twentieth century - as an alternative which thrives on “bloodied” dis-unity, emphasizing the
unreliability of the particular, and approaching universality only through a shared sense of selfcriticism. The cosmopolitan Gothic, as with all modes of Gothicism, refuses Western rationalism
and its unrelenting hold to focus on trepid explorers wandering into vague corners of the globe in
search of the “foreignness” hidden within.
Working from this definition, a valid critique of the cosmopolitan Gothic is that it cannot
pragmatically be applied to world affairs in order to address urgent questions, such as the reallocation of material resources. Kantian idealists would dismiss such a mode of expression as
nihilistic or as a reactionary defiance, bound to be overcome in the steady “progress” of Western
thought. Critic Mark Edmundson, preferring traditional metaphysics over subsequent Gothic
detours, criticizes the genre in precisely these terms. He contends the genre to be valuable only if
one uses it to return to reasonable lines of thinking post-sojourn, a return to “the vision of life”
(Edmundson, 179). He condemns writers such as Poe for being involved in a dead-end style
based solely on “disillusionment.” This, according to Edmundson, promotes a far from fruitful
way to co-exist in a global community.
From an opposing perspective, scholar Tabish Khair claims the genre is actually too often
grounded in formulaic metaphysics. Gothic handlings of cultural difference, from his perspective,
merely stage difference; they feign alterity while in reality presuming universalism. Khair notes
there is therefore a pressing need for “Otherness that cannot be simply reduced to the Self-same”
(Khair, 101). In contrast to Edmundson, Khair does not find the Gothic to be based on genuine
29

“disillusionment.” Edmundson’s call for a return to positivist values in the Gothic obscures what
Khair views as the danger behind such a proposition: a (continued) reliance upon racial
determinism.

20

The cosmopolitan Gothic in the works I examine operates somewhere between the
extremes of Edmundson and Khair’s competing positions. It is not based on a “dead-end”; in fact,
its endless wandering is part of its nature. Nor does it go out in search of pre-determined
securities. Many of the artists in question call into doubt their representations at moments in
which they seem to be approaching an a priori Truth about Japanese – or, more often, American
- culture. This reflects a Hegelian yearning to pry open the crypts of one’s imagination while
never exorcising the enticing strangeness propelling one forward. In many of the texts I will
consider in the following chapters, no distinction is held sacred, especially America’s assumed
centrality – nothing, that is, but the freedom to unveil mutual uncertainty during fantasized
movements abroad.

21

In aesthetic terms, cosmopolitanism – like the Gothic – can be understood as offering a
productive lens through which to engage in dynamic self-expansion. Oscar Wilde, one of the
earliest figures to fuse the cosmopolitan ideal with artistic self-criticism, enjoyed the attendant
detachment and the ironic power of distance from which to call preconceived notions into
question. Julia Prewitt Brown’s study of Wilde contemplates the impact of his contribution:
“Art’s freedom from ethics is the basis of its usefulness to us as ethical beings. Its transcendence
of received morality is what forwards our own ethical discovery” (J. Brown, 75). Art-for-art’s
sake, when applied to an overly-aestheticized vision of the globe, leads to a cosmopolitanism
favoring literary or cinematic experimentation and opens the way for a kind of tabula rasa in

30

those seeking the liberty to experience other cultures. Amanda Anderson seizes upon Wilde’s
proposition and defends the “considerable gains achieved by the denaturalizing attitude towards
norms and conventions” (A. Anderson, 5). By assuming the “view from nowhere,” according to
Anderson, cosmopolitans subject not only different peoples to scrutiny but also their own
shortcomings, granting an opportunity for “ethical discovery.” Her study of “reflective
interrogation of cultural norms” informs my larger project as the figures analyzed in each chapter
attempt to locate in the “Japan Idea” boundaries of their perspectives through trial-and-error with
various modes of expression.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz builds from Wilde and Anderson, arguing an over-aestheticized
style is perhaps the most redemptive effect of a critical cosmopolitan worldview. She states, “A
cosmopolitan style is not an alternative to or replacement for a cosmopolitan politics… rather, it
describes an analytic feature of critical cosmopolitanism, which has been used politically by
writers” (Walkowitz, 28). Aesthetics, often entwined with feelings of detachment, undermines
the a priori unity Kant and Nussbaum render as appealing, constructing a compelling narrative to
celebrate “instead of judgment and progress, an ethos of uncertainty, hesitation, and even wit that
is sometimes at odds with political actions” (5). Walkowitz reminds one that cosmopolitanism
continually exposes the subject to distance and discomfort. As Gothic literature influenced Wilde
and the modernist writers, the thread connecting Gothic sentiments to Walkowitz’s cosmopolitan
style emerges as a fear of non-rationalism intermingled with a negation of self-certitude.
The cosmopolitan Gothic conceptualizes a bond between the aspiration to understand
better fellow “world citizens” and the hope to recognize the potential follies and delusions in this
enterprise. David Punter, a historian of the Gothic, argues the genre discloses “life is not a matter
of petty detail, but an experience of self-mythologization and of mythologization of the world
31

around us” (Punter, 408). The cosmopolitan Gothic illuminates these mutual mythologizations
and, through distance always lapsing into proximity, exposes their fictive nature. It challenges
one to expand her concept of the globe without reliance upon easy or narrow-minded
abstractions. At its most productive, a cosmopolitan Gothic helps one “to localize imagination,”
to recognize the “Japan Idea” as a local construction (Day, 73).

22

This returns us to Frank Emory

Bunts’ story “A Japanese Hell” and the hopelessly unreliable narrator trekking through the dark
caverns of the archipelago.
Nevertheless, readings of a cosmopolitan Gothic ought not to overlook the presence of
other peoples in favor of purely circulatory self-examination; accordingly, the dissertation
accordingly concludes by deliberating upon the anxieties the two cultures have come to share in
the last century through transnational engagement by analyzing the work of director Shimizu
Takashi. Charles L. Crow’s American Gothic is one of the few studies articulating this exchange,
founded upon “a shifting geographical, cultural, linguistic and racial boundary” (Crow, 2). He
situates Hearn, an author whose influence runs throughout the project, as one of the foundational
figures in asserting the global characteristics of an American Gothic. From Hearn forward, Crow
realizes “ideas and influences pass back and forth across the increasing permeable membranes of
national and linguistic frontiers… thus American Gothic becomes part of the worldwide
literature of the strange and terrifying” (102). The Gothic traditions of various cultures,
especially those of Japan, have been “passed back” to Western artists throughout the twentieth
century, shaping the discourse in equally profound ways. One hears the whispers of countless
Japanese students serving as translators, not to mention the citizens who initially conceptualized
and vocalized stimulating tales from Japan. The American Gothic of the past century, I assert,
23

strongly inter-connects with the Japanese tales from which it derives inspiration.
32

Visions of a

“supernatural Japan” thus challenge audiences to re-consider alongside Kristeva how Gothic
strains expose the presuppositions at the core of particular cosmopolitan world-views and how
Western-centric constructions of modernity attempt to keep at bay what has long been
repressed.24
Specters of Modernity
In sum, this dissertation will investigate how themes of the supernatural have been
informed by cultural representations of, as well as exchanges with, the archipelago. Though not
without serious ethical concern, instead of simply serving as an abject symbol, the renderings of
an imaginary “Japan” I analyze also allow for self-critique in Western audiences.
Correspondingly, as cultural theorist Naoki Sakai claims, the “West” can only exist through
similar constructions of a subversive “Rest.”

25

The “Japan Idea” has been employed consistently

to (re)define the limits of the Western project, be they manifest in phantoms of the “anti-modern”
or in a sublime postmodernity. In this way, the dissertation continuously seeks to define
“modernity,” a term highly criticized in contemporary debate. I will define “modernity” herein as
emerging in tandem with the rise of capitalism and multinational corporations; as I am using it,
the term marks a historical moment in which the logic of capital promotes reckless expansion
and homogenization, particularly emanating from a specific Western model. The result of this
brand of modernity leaves an array of distinct cultures confronting the very same specters with
similar discursive tools. The boundaries of this “modernity” are patrolled in perpetuity by
fantastic entities, ranging from invisible remnants of an Emersonian tradition to the liberating
apparitions of cyber-communities.

33

In a number of ways, each chapter of this project analyzes dissatisfaction with the
modernization philosopher Martin Heidegger discusses in a 1938 lecture entitled “The Age of
the World Picture.” Heidegger maintains the rise of man as a subject, and the globe as an
objectified picture, leads to a sense there remains something “gigantic” behind it all, denied by a
purely scientific perspective. He observes,
The modern world extends itself out into a space withdrawn from representation, and so
lends to the incalculable the determinateness peculiar to it, as well as a historical
uniqueness. This shadow, however, points to something else, which it is denied to us of
today to know. (Heidegger, 136)
The texts this project interrogates seek to extend Western paradigms into unchartered global
spaces, specifically “Japan”; in so doing, they confront a “determinateness” marking a prescribed
outlook. Suggested by supernatural moments from “Japan” is Heidegger’s shadow, the shadow
of an alarming (Heidegger suggests Utopian) force within humanity. These specters of modernity
materialize in tropes of the “fantastic,” which actually run throughout fantasy, science fiction,
and the Gothic alike. Collectively, these tropes comprise in certain cases a cosmopolitan Gothic
style which portrays an unfamiliar culture in order to expose familiar fears of the twentieth
century.

26

Western authors and filmmakers confront this version of the “Japan Idea” in a multitude
of contexts, including predominantly the imperial, atomic, and economic. These historical
moments reveal a period of over-reach, different brands of excess, in Western culture. At these
moments, certain texts seek a way to move into “spaces incalculable” and “withdrawn from
representation” to articulate an encounter with the country’s burgeoning – and, theoretically, de-

34

stabilizing – potential. Critic Ellen Moers identifies the projection of inner surplus as a
fundamental element of the Gothic genre. Among the brooding cast of characters throughout its
history, she argues, “all are overreachers, all are punished by their own excesses” (Moers, 95).
One discovers in these spaces a return of what has been repressed by rationalism: internal
“foreignness,” abjection, uncontrollable lust for global expansion. These unique moments of
“overreach,” read upon a distant culture, allow for an imaginary obliteration of cohesive cultural
identities, including “male/female,” “American/Japanese,” and others.
.

The first chapter focuses on early Japanology and its deployment of the supernatural to

express the ambivalence of modernity at the fin-de-siecle. The two authors, Fenollosa and Hearn,
craft a narrative of “Japan” for Western readers through engagement with specters, be they
“Divine” and/or unsettling. This collision in the crucible of modernization was made possible
through popular artifacts of Japonisme. The chapter places these two figures in conversation with
one another in order to demonstrate how the idea of “Japan” was framed via an active inquiry
into where one might find phantasms in a rapidly industrializing age. As this chapter will
elucidate, the resultant texts signify specters in order to mediate the competing and
complimentary impulses of cultural imperialism on one hand and literary modernism on the
other.
The second chapter turns to Fenollosa’s wife, Mary McNeil Fenollosa (pseudonym
Sidney McCall). McCall’s fiction attempts, in complicated ways, to speak back to Hearn’s antimodern “Ghosts” and her husband’s phenomenological “Spirits.” The chapter analyzes her use
of plot devices from a Gothic tradition and her exploration of gender identity through narratives
depicting ghostly maidens from “Japan.” Her fiction incorporates a subversive “supernatural
Japan” into a dialectical narrative in order to problematize the familiar alignment of “Japan” with
35

“femininity.” The third chapter, building off of the gender issues raised in the second, interprets
the works of Theodate Geoffrey (pseudonym for Dorothy Wayman), Onoto Watanna
(pseudonym for Winnifred Eaton), as well as Mrs. Hugh Fraser, authors who each attempt to use
the Female Gothic to position “Japan” in relation to constructions of “femininity.” These authors
maintain conventions from the Female Gothic to position the “feminine” and “Japan” as monster
and maiden. Like McCall, they seize the merging as an opportunity - though deeply problematic
- to express “female potential.” The second and third chapters focus on the trope of a “spectral
Japan” to challenge and affirm simultaneously prescriptive gender norms.
The fourth chapter studies the phenomenon of Godzilla, probing one of the most
memorable icons imported from Japan, the towering monster born of atomic warfare. This
chapter retains relevance given the nuclear nightmares returning from repression amidst the
tragic Japanese earthquake of 2011, after which the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant became a
pressing cause for concern in Japanese and American discourse. I examine the Japanese Gojira
films, as well as the American re-makes, in connection to critical discourse surrounding the
nuclear issue. Both the event and Godzilla have been interpreted from conflicting perspectives.
By surveying the critical perspectives of Nuclear Critics with those reading the Toho terror, I
contend Godzilla as a monstrous icon serves the vital purpose of sustaining discussions
surrounding atomic anxiety, once again refuting the certainty of any singular stance on this
controversial issue.
Following Godzilla, depictions of a “supernatural Japan” increasingly focus on the
postmodern condition. The next three chapters explore how “Japan” provides a uniquely situated
fictional space in which one faces the dread of late capitalism, including the terrifying alterity of
technology emergent at the so-called “end of history.” The fifth chapter examines “Japan
36

bashing” in the 1980s and tropes of the monstrous used to articulate the phenomenon, engaging
popular horror films such as Joe Dante’s Gremlins in dialogue with seminal postmodern theorists
such as Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes, especially the foundational study Empire of Signs.
While a pseudo-dialectics was prevalent during the Cold War, the introduction of a demonized
“Japanese capitalism” offers for Dante an alternative type of Other, one based on a degree of
difference, not of kind.
The sixth chapter pursues how Japanese horror films, made popular in the late 1990s,
orbit the absence of a central event, the “ghostliness” at the core of post-modernity, while
American re-makes habitually re-install an authentic presence for the haunting in question: a
core trauma to re-contain. These films suggest that beneath artificial cultural constructs of the
Nation and History, there is potential for shared trepidation (and thus, a more transnational
Gothicism). In particular, this section will focus on the films of director Shimizu Takashi.
Shimizu’s atemporal horror films, channeling the mysticism of psychoanalyst Carl Jung and the
Japanese philosopher Yuasa Yasuo, propose a substitute to the causality normally privileged in
hauntings diagnosed as Freudian. Shimizu pursues an “overcoming of modernity” as a
homogenizing force emanating from a Western tradition and, as a result, invigorates the horror
film to move one towards a radical re-examination of the genre’s basic Western-centric tenets.
The final chapter concludes by analyzing by cyber-punk literature in the last decades of
the twentieth century in dialogue with Nolan’s revision in Inception. The relationship between
Saito and Cobb, characters I read as an allusion to Japanese and American “soft powers,” plays
out in fascinating ways, down through the layers of dreams and constructs of culture embedded
within them. Enclosing “Japan” as a dream-world, defined by its major export (technology), was
the task of cyberpunk; Nolan, in contrast, utilizes a twenty-first century Bildungsroman, an
37

adventure into the postmodern realm identified within the confines of the archipelago, to then
interrogate the solidity of the place to which the film ultimately returns. Through this encounter
with “Japan,” one becomes unsettled by the equally fictitious grounding of “America.” This
analysis, relying upon theorist Theodor W. Adorno’s “negative dialectics,” allows one see how
fantasies of a “supernatural Japan” have been sustained over the course of the previous century
and how this persistent trend supposes the confidences - and anxieties - of an American subject
toward positions of cultural stability.
At stake in this study is a deeper understanding of how imaginary “Japan” routinely
embodies the outer limit of modernity and forces one to re-situate oneself in relation to this
perimeter. I recall departing from Matsue, with its rustic canals, and beginning to understand my
attraction to foreign phantoms and what they exposed in my moments of doubt. Winding my way
out from under the watchful presence of Mt. Daisen, I contemplated a mutual uncanny shaped by
two distinct, but eerily similar, cultures. The cosmopolitan Gothic problematizes the U.S.
relationship with Japan in challenging but productive ways, offering alternatives to previous
paradigms set forth as the two nations move, together, into the next century.

38

27

Discourses of the Invisible
“Ghosts” and “Spirits” in Early American Japanology

In the 1890s, Japanese curios filled American living rooms in parallel with a rising
cosmopolitanism. This chapter will focus on how early Japanologists utilized the trendy
formulation of an imaginary “Japan” to contemplate unseen forces in a modernizing world.
Ernest Fenollosa, a professor from Salem who taught philosophy at Tokyo University, spent the
bulk of his career documenting these curios to reveal the energy behind world “progress.”
Lafcadio Hearn was a nomadic journalist who was sent to Japan in 1890 to write about its
“unfamiliar aspects.” Hearn’s writing, though radically different from Fenollosa’s in style,
likewise utilized an assortment of Japanese curios to express a supernatural essence within
modern life, marked by its discursive absence. Early Japanology thus marks a significant and
unsettled structural shift in how a discourse of the invisible represented “Japan.”

28

The two

authors strove to expose the emptiness beneath Gilded Age artifices while also projecting,
through gathered Japanese materials, narratives of other-worldly forces made manifest in an
imagined archipelago.29
Following Commodore Perry’s mission to the country in 1853 to open its doors to foreign
trade, Japan continued to modernize at a rate unheard of previously. In the government’s zeal for
Westernization (to “catch up”), the value of modernity was called into question directly.
Subsequently, on one hand, “Japan” became a place onto which Westerners could project
modernization as a successful (and pre-determined) phenomenon. On the other, Western
discontents could point to the splendor of a culture that was being meticulously destroyed,
lamenting a romanticized life before modernity had been introduced – which, of course, never
truly existed. Both versions of “Japan” relied upon specters, be they reassuring or terrifying in
39

consequence.

30

This fictional movement “further West” in American discourse contributed to what David
Mogen calls the “frontier Gothic.” After the proclaimed closure of the American frontier,
“Japan” in the 1890s unlocked the next logical step in a collective wandering outward. Fantasies
involving the archipelago consequently inherited the dual sensations associated with American
“progress”: “an ambivalent sense of destiny, projected into dreadful apprehensions of personal or
cosmic apocalypse” (Mogen, 102). The fantastic realm of “Japan” served as an intersection
between the “Ghost” of everything denied by Enlightenment thought (the Romantic, irrational,
intangible) and the “Spirit” of everything the Enlightenment supposedly promised (global order,
the triumph of rationalism, the “Divine” made tangible via materialist “progress”).

31

Concerning

the phantoms at work here, Renee L. Bergland remarks, “The lore and language of ghostliness
are particularly appropriate for describing the encounters that take place within the mysteriously
shifting grounds of American cultural frontiers” (Bergland, 93). As American influence stretched
beyond its Western border, unsettled attitudes toward a nationalized supernatural were reinscribed upon fantastic tales adapted from the land of the Rising Sun, transforming into what I
label as the cosmopolitan Gothic.
Edward J. Ingebretsen, S.J. charts this spiritual unrest from the time of the Puritans
through current trends in popular horror fiction. He applies critical mapping to explain the
recurrent search for imperceptible powers: “To remember the Holy as a divine principle is in
effect to remember, and in some cases to set, boundaries or limits beyond which the human does
not or cannot go” (Ingebretsen, xv). Early Japanology instilled a poetic cartography by drawing
boundaries both literal and imaginary. It comes perhaps as no surprise that what Ingebretsen
recognizes as a defining ambivalence between the invisible as “Divine” and the invisible as a
40

cause for trembling emerges in initial reflections concerning “Japan.” He envisions the slippery
dichotomy as a long-standing “rite” in American culture: “It re-presents – makes present again –
a familiar pattern of events by which to embody and to make right the relationship between the
community and its transcendent possibilities” (177). Hearn and Fenollosa reveal that these
discursive “rituals” were not limited to descriptions of the American wilderness, the frontier of a
Puritan mindset, but were disseminated far further into constructions of the Far East.
By examining the clash of two supernatural powers at the dawn of the twentieth century,
one unveils competing impulses emergent in American discourse articulated in the fictive
framing of “Japan.” In Fenollosa’s model, the reader primarily revels in a metaphysical presence,
a timeless structure that radiates across all cultures; in the words of Hearn, the reader focuses on
a proto-modernist absence, a vanished (or vanishing) essence.

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However, instead of reading

these notions as oppositional, one might read them in conversation in hopes of better
understanding how early Japanology handled the transition between familiar positivisms and
“cosmopolitan modernisms” (to borrow Rebecca Walkowitz’s term).

33

Theorist Fredric Jameson

notes:
In the first great period of bourgeois hegemony, the reinvention of romance finds its
strategy in the substitution of new positivities (theology, psychology, the dramatic
metaphor) for the older magical content. When, at the end of the nineteenth century, the
search for secular equivalents seems exhausted, the characteristic of a nascent
modernism… circumscribes the place of the fantastic as a determinate, marked absence at
the heart of the secular world. (Jameson 1981, 120 – 121)
Early Japanology offers a brief moment to reflect upon how structural transitions were
negotiated around the popular idea of a Far Eastern culture, revealing the dueling forces within
41

the respective positions of these two writers and their arbitration of the outward push of
imperialism in correlation to the daunting enclosures of modern existence. In the end perhaps
Hearn and Fenollosa, writing in the midst of a wider cultural transition into early modernism,
reach common ground with their phantasms, as they are to an extent still reliant upon the
predictable designs of late Romanticism.
Beneath this reification, ambivalence toward unseen forces serves as an important
connection between American and Japanese culture at the turn of the century. Marilyn Ivy’s
study, Discourses of the Vanishing, analyzes Japanese modernity and nativist ethnography
during the Meiji era, focusing primarily on Yanagita Kunio’s seminal Legends of Tono. Ivy
argues modernity is defined by competing phantasms in Japan, an amalgamation of specters
lamenting a nostalgia for belief in higher powers while, at the same moment, constructing
certainty in the invisible forces guiding modernization. She writes about “a discipline that
ensures the disappearance of its origins as it constructs them” (Ivy, 95). Gerald Figal’s
Civilization and Monsters too explores the complex commodification of Japanese phantoms
during the Meiji era. As Figal notes, “The scientific study of the supernatural… indeed appear to
be universal phenomena of modernity. Whether Japan’s modernity is particularly distinguished
from that of other nations in its preoccupation with the fantastic, however, is a question left for
future comparative studies” (Figal, 14 – 15).
This chapter seeks to expand this conversation across the Pacific. While Figal and Ivy
each focus on Japanese discourse specifically, one can apply their analysis of ghostly depictions
to Western writers contemplating “Japan” at the fin-de-siecle. Specters recorded within the
archipelago served a similar purpose in both cultures at a time of unprecedented international
growth; figures who described “Japan” for a Western audience were playing out an analogous

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impulse as the one Ivy and Figal locate in Japanese writers such as Yanagita, who was directly
influenced by Hearn’s methodology. Yanagita’s ethnographic writings were similarly torn
between a desire to manifest a cohesive, unified Japanese “Spirit,” emerging during this time of
rapid national advancement into imperial strides, and his desire to depict the primitive beliefs as
grotesque “Ghosts” unsettling the rigid framework of modernization used by historical
chroniclers. Yanagita, like Fenollosa and Hearn, constructs a mystical essence for the recently
unified body politic by concurrently deconstructing confidence in such a body through the
lingering presence of ghostly remainders. Frontiers posited at the edges of two rapidly
modernizing countries are haunted by expressions of transcendence - boundary-crossing and
growth into “infinity” – at odds with a dramatic recession of faith, much like the push and pull of
Hiroshige’s emblematic wave which came to serve as a metaphor of early interactions between
the two nations.
The methods with which Hearn and Fenollosa re-imagine or challenge this supernatural
paradigm, and the justifications they found to support their narratives, is what makes them
distinct. Still, it would be a mistake to view their approaches as clearly delineated into two
separate schools, Jameson’s differentiation between what might be read as Fenollosa’s “new
positivities” and Hearn’s “nascent modernism.” It was a shift moving, like most, in starts and
spurts.

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Although, by focusing on ends rather than means, both Japanologists would earn

posthumous reputations as unabashed Orientalists, better understanding the relationship of their
visions will allow one to tease out the dynamic complexities of modernization via its reliance on
aesthetic specters. Illuminating a collision between “Spirits” and “Ghosts” imported from a
newly-opened land also allows one to consider more thoroughly why images of “Japan”
repeatedly align with the invisible throughout the last century.

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Spencer’s Modernity: The Uncertain Invisible
Behind their positions, one more resistant to modernization (Hearn) and the other more
optimistic about its prospects (Fenollosa), the language of early Japanology was based largely in
popular incantations of Western metaphysics.35 They founded their philosophy in consultation
with the works of one popularizer of “progress,” Herbert Spencer. Fenollosa formed the Herbert
Spencer Club while at Harvard and Hearn idolized the man in excess. Fenollosa regarded
Spencer, as did many Western figures at the time, as an idealist regarding the development of the
West. Hearn, however, read Spencer as far more Romantic, advocating a mystical determinism
that could not be fully understood, an unwieldy terror beyond our consciousness that would be
fully articulated in the decades to follow by horror writers such as H.P. Lovecraft. Spencer’s
uncertainty allowed Hearn to justify his brand of “ghostliness,” verified through a marriage of
Spencerian thought to Eastern philosophy. Fenollosa’s wife, Mary McNeil Fenollosa, writes in
one letter: “(Hearn) spoke of the sympathy between Herbert Spencer and Buddhism. We don’t
agree to this but didn’t contradict it” (Chisolm, 6). The foundational split over how to interpret
Spencerian thought affirms a key distinction between the two men: Fenollosa believed man
would be emboldened by his discovery of a new telos present in Japan and Hearn anticipated
mankind would be humbled by its profound absence, a concept he believed to be already eminent
in Japanese culture.
The stances held by Hearn and Fenollosa were in part derived from differing
interpretations of a philosophical work they each held in high esteem: Spencer’s First Principles
(1862). Spencerian theory, symptomatic of Western modernity at that moment, was plagued by
an internal conflict between fantastic energies as “self-enclosed” and fantastic energies as “self-

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reflective,” even “self-destructive,” in nature. Spencer’s methodology was employed, broadly
speaking, for two ends: tearing down older phantoms and, at the same time, replacing them with
an alternative invisible entity. This phenomenon was not dissimilar from the one identified by
Ivy in Japan, one relentlessly proclaiming a shrinking potency – in many cases, theology – while
simultaneously attempting to fill it with a revised presence (in most cases, a brand of science or
industry).
One quickly discovers the influence of a younger Spencer on Fenollosa’s philosophical
renderings of the Far East in the dedication to the order and logic of the cosmos. In the closing of
First Principles, Spencer espouses a “new positivism”: “knowledge of (the ‘unknowable’)
remains incomplete until it has united the past, present, and future histories into a whole”
(Spencer, 246). Spencer, after much labor, begins to uncover “a single metamorphosis
universally progressing,” and his project seems to shift more purposefully toward idealism (491).
“In their ensemble the general truths reached exhibit, under certain aspects, a oneness not
hitherto observed” (483).
Within the same work lay the seeds of a skeptical, “nascent modernism.” Earlier chapters
echo the mysticism of Hearn: “in its ultimate nature nothing can be known” (54). Using terms
such as “vague consciousness” and “shadowy and indefinite” to describe the meaning behind
“progress,” Spencer seems at the opening of First Principles to compliment Hearn’s image of an
Eastern cosmology (72; 94). Spencer’s “Unknowable,” for Hearn, reminds the idealist that man’s
knowledge is confined and must, after the endless collection of small facts, eventually confront
the seemingly “unanswerable” question: “What lies beyond?”(12). The answers Hearn and
Fenollosa extract from Spencer’s theory represent their fundamental schism.
Fenollosa found solace in the earlier works of Spencer, who could be more easily

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reconciled with his idealism. He aligned himself with the Spencer he saw as optimistic that the
“unknowable” was, in fact, knowable - it would simply involve a more advanced epistemology.
Hearn resembles the later Spencer, who, according to Spencer biographer Mark Francis, “learned
to avoid the archaic language of theology” (Francis, 210). Hearn, glossing over Spencer’s
ambivalence, appreciated the Spencer Francis writes “rejected German Idealism in social
explanation as he had in biology… (and had) no faith in reason in history” (300). Spencer’s shift
in emphasis parallels his reference by the two men: Fenollosa gradually moved away from
Spencer as the British philosopher appeared to grow more cynical while Hearn encountered
Spencer late in his career, attracted to this cynical worldview. In each case, neglecting aspects of
the work failing to complement their arguments, the two Japanologists continued to borrow ad
hoc from the Spencerian canon.36 Spencer, as an essential thinker who was embraced widely by
the Western academy during this era, was himself unsure of how to resolve this crucial conflict
with the notion of invisible forces inside of modernity. His ambivalence subsequently shapes the
spectral framework for those viewing “Japan” as an ideal social experiment for testing
modernity’s margins.
Methodologically, Hearn and Fenollosa, like Spencer, postured themselves as
pragmatists. Earlier in the nineteenth century, Spencer worked out his philosophy through
exhaustively detailed processes, leaving no element of the natural world unturned, giving his
work a sense of gravitas for many Western thinkers. Influenced by these techniques, Hearn
catalogued the minutiae of everyday Japanese life, including the daily rituals of its insects, to
make broader philosophical claims about the archipelago; Fenollosa likewise depended on
factual evidence he collected in material artifacts, relied upon by the Japanese government to
assist in assembling its national art work. Representing an uneasiness for, as well as attraction to,

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overarching narratives of “progress” at the turn of the century, the early Japanologists garnished
their interpretations with the scientific language they found in Spencer in order to compensate for
the supernatural aspects of their claims. Beneath such rationalist explication remained an everunsettled confrontation between traditional impulses to convey the guidance of angels and an
emergent impulse to watch these elements dissipate in the winds of change.

Fenollosa’s “Spirit”
Supernatural sentiment appears throughout Fenollosa’s endeavors to record the Far East.
Fenollosa describes the art of the Buddhist Tendai sect, a sect to which he himself belonged:

(Buddhist art allows) the opening of the inner eye to natural facts and spiritual
presences that are veiled from lower forms… the power to image forth truth in
forms of glowing vision… to project angelic groups upon the background of
contemplation… all this is of the very substance, not of poetry and music, but of
visual art. (Fenollosa 2007a, 122 – 123)

Fenollosa, harboring affections for Transcendentalism, believed his spiritual experience with
Eastern art allowed him to peek into the inner-workings of a hidden sphere. Religious
determinism was revised and expanded in correspondence with scientific determinism through
intellectual engagement with the “Japan Idea.” The “progress” of man for Fenollosa inherently
revolved around Western man’s potential to glimpse once again the presence of a higher power
guiding humanity back toward harmony, even if the tools for locating that harmony existed in
bits and fragments of Asia’s imagined past. His “magical narratives,” to appropriate Jameson’s
term, sutured disparate cultural products to resurrect feelings of faith. In so doing, Fenollosa’s

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synthesis of American and Japanese culture offered a teleology in line with emergent twentieth
century values: “The two halves of the globe come together for the final creation of man…
within the coming century the blended strength of Scientific Analysis and Spiritual Wisdom
should wed for eternity the blended grace of Aesthetic Synthesis and Spiritual Love” (Fenollosa
2007b, v – vi). Man could retain Science, enriched by spirituality and art from Japan, retaining
confidence in what unfolded previously and what was yet to unfold. This alternative teleology
was not at odds with exposure to non-Christian cultures, an unlikely insularity for Fenollosa, a
practicing cosmopolitan in an age of rapid global expansion, but restored a greater sense of
purpose for his “worldly audience.” Retaining the unbridled optimism of an idealist tradition,
Fenollosa advocated that a Western audience should therefore be filled with a sense of
“Oneness” in confidently moving to the next frontier.
Fenollosa felt he could demonstrate, with material proof, that these sensibilities were not
only Romantic, but concrete and widely applicable. Never straying far from his Emersonian
roots, Fenollosa maintained the evolution of art was coming full circle: Western “progress”
would soon realize its full potential in a reunion with Japan. Art began in Greece, Fenollosa
argued, and had split into a Western and Eastern arc. Embrace of Japan signaled a closing of the
circle, promising unity between Western reason and Eastern aesthetics, a mutual past and a
collaborative future. Fenollosa’s poem, “The East and West: The Discovery of America,”
presented at a Phi Beta Kappa ceremony at Harvard, expressed this sentiment as follows: “so the
pure germ of art/washed from its native soil/warm with the last caress of Grecian toil/nestled
against the oriental heart” (Fenollosa 2007b, 13). Fenollosa alleged his collection of art from the
archipelago would prove, in a tangible sense, that the global movement of America into the
markets of the world was predestined and perfectly logical. In his estimation, his collections and

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commentaries demonstrated “Spirit” was “world-embracing.” Fenollosa elaborates, “(In the
epochs of Art), the parts belong together, and will interlock… it is one great working of the
human mind… we see the separate shining planes of movement of the human spirit” (Fenollosa
2007b, xxxii). The logic of “Spirit” re-affirmed itself in how the two halves of the globe had met
once again, proving, once and for all, there was a “Divine” purpose behind Western development
and mankind could find fulfillment by visiting his exhibits of Japanese artwork.
Planted in what he felt to be the rich soil of Emersonian and Hegelian Idealism, Fenollosa
retained an eternal optimism concerning Western development. He held weekly discussions on
Hegel’s philosophy with his wife and friends, his work a veritable extension of Hegelian thought
in a late nineteenth-century context, to which “Japan” added texture. Fenollosa biographer
Lawrence Chisolm recognizes Fenollosa’s “Hegelian lust after logical system” (Chisolm, 6). He
argued Western man could escape the frustration of entrapment in a world full of modern
efficiencies by purchasing what was believed to be “sensitive” art from the East. Fenollosa’s
tome, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, published posthumously in 1912 from lectures and
notes, serves as a virtual compendium to Hegel’s Aesthetics. Its ambition was to assimilate Asian
art into the historical progression of mankind. Fenollosa writes,
The treatment of Chinese and Japanese Art together, as of a single aesthetic movement,
is a third innovation. It is shown that not only were they, as wholes, almost as closely
inter-related as Greek Art and Roman, but that the every-varying phases interlock into a
sort of mosaic pattern, or, rather, unfold in a single dramatic movement. We are
approaching the time when the art work of all the world of man may be looked upon as
one, as infinite variations in a single kind of mental and social effort. (Fenollosa 2007a,
xxx)

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Unifying various strands of religious and artistic thought, Fenollosa canonized Japanese
aesthetics in the Western imagination to make sense of the synthesizing gales blowing across the
Pacific. With characteristic confidence, a trait critic Henry Adams bitterly described after visiting
Fenollosa in Japan, Fenollosa made statements such as the following: “I am proving that some of
their supposed treasures are relatively worthless and bringing forth the real gems from unknown
holes” (Brooks, 24). As one can readily see, Fenollosa’s idealism buttressed a project already
saturated with overtones of cultural imperialism.
According to Fenollosa, it was the “changing moods and powers” of a specifically
Western man that had the final say on where “Spirit” would geographically reach its end. He
promoted confidence that to collect art from around the globe would lead to omniscience over
man’s moral evolution, a classical formula of the fantastic presence leaking from every pore.
Emboldened by the authority placed upon him by the Japanese government at a young age,
Fenollosa supported “progress” with a “Zen-like recognition that something characteristic and
structural in every organic and inorganic form is friendly to man, and responds gladly to the
changing moods and powers of his spirit” (Fenollosa 2007a, 33). However, this “characteristic
structure” revealed itself to be subject to the whims of a particular Western academic. In the
years to come, in part because of a perceived slight by the Japanese government, Fenollosa
claimed one should not mistake Japan as the literal peak of the movement, but merely another
temporary resting place in the evolution toward the apotheosis of Western perfection: America.
Ironically, behind the supposedly all-powerful mechanics of the universe, the agency of a
Western scholar seemed to dictate “Spirit’s” movement according to his monetarily-influenced
and shifting preferences. Thus “Spirit” is exposed as an integral component in the rise of
bourgeois individualism among cultural authorities.
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Fenollosa remained mired in his role as a Western analyst claiming ownership over the
“East” theoretically and in practice. Preserving a Japanese aesthetic, but doing so thousands of
miles away in a private collection in Boston he insisted on naming after himself, demonstrates
the complicated nature of Fenollosa’s project. Hearn laments to Fenollosa (“the Professor”) in
one letter, “I only regret that you do not use legends, - do not tell stories” (Bisland, 383).
Fenollosa, an able artist as well as a trained singer of traditional Japanese music, may also have
struggled with this idea, vacillating between his creative impulses - the energies he found
pulsating beneath language - and his empirical reputation. Fenollosa was not alone in this overreaching; literary scholar Thomas Peysar notes that “sweeping generalizations, often
unencumbered by an evidentiary basis, and vast systematization of world-history epochs marked
the culmination, if that is the right word, of the overheated intellectual style” (Peyser, 68). The
entrapment in a gray area between supernatural and historical determinism is yet another
manifestation of turn of the century negotiations regarding which “Spirits” and “Ghosts” would
define the spiritual life of twentieth century Americans.
In the end, Fenollosa’s “Spirit” was more dynamic, and ambiguous, than he could hope to
articulate fully. Theorist David Krell’s assessment of Hegel applies well to Fenollosa: “He will
always want to cover his tracks and hedge his bets, will always want to insist on his capacity to
swallow it all and embrace everything in the name of spirit” (Krell, 165). Examples appear in his
complicated approach to the “unknowable” aspects of his subject. Conceivably, to recognize the
Romantic differences, and increasingly the early modernist ones, titillating suburban audiences
would force Fenollosa to admit his lack as interpreter and cultural consultant. In turn, to
recognize his “Spirit” as a theory based solely on abstraction would threaten his position as
historian. This troubling absence, looming beneath feeble authority, was fastidiously buried by

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his meticulous catalogues, a routine refusal of the potential that would directly inspire the early
modernists via posthumous collaboration with Ezra Pound.
Although always exploding outward, Fenollosa’s thought returns at crucial points to the
entrapment of man’s energies in the rigid system of modernity. This ambivalence appears most
lastingly in Fenollosa’s The Chinese Character as a Medium of Poetry. Though the text
undoubtedly strives to illuminate the poetic nature of Man (“vistas of strange futures unfold for
man, of world-embracing cultures”), it strives moreover to break down the presence once
imagined to be emanating from Western paradigms (Fenollosa 1968, 3). He locates within
Western language an unsettling absence: “In nature there is no completeness… no full sentence
really completes a thought… there could be no complete sentence (according to this definition)
save one which it would take all time to pronounce” (11). Although he ultimately fights to
restore the existence of a “world-embracing” energy, this particular text tarries around the
concept of emptiness, unable to escape it.

37

While much of Fenollosa’s early work finds its counterpoint in Hegel’s Philosophy of
History, critiqued vociferously for its ethnocentrism, The Chinese Character as a Medium for
Poetry correlates with the more nuanced passages of Hegel’s The Science of Logic as well as The
Phenomenology of Spirit. Although “Spirit” is still everywhere, it eludes any solid
conceptualization; Emersonian energies spring forth from the patterns of Romanticism to escape
a singular hold. Hence, though elsewhere in Fenollosa’s system “Spirit” finds its expression in
arrested works of Japanese art, here it is more closely aligned with electricity and music, those
most invisible and purely abstract of forms.

38

Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon, and

the one which is known to have directly inspired Pound, remains Fenollosa’s contemplation of
proper nouns, a form reifying thought, against verbs, a form preserving the liveliness and
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dynamism of the mental process: “The untruth of a painting or a photograph is that, in spite of its
concreteness, it drops the element of natural succession” (45). Echoing negation privileged by
Hegel’s dialectic, one derives from this late work an endless undoing of human Understanding (a
concept surely attractive among the modernists to follow).
Hearn, in response to Fenollosa’s aggressive assertion of positivism and in line with
Fenollosa’s lapse into proto-modernist sentiment in The Chinese Written Character, attempted to
re-establish skepticism, echoing in ways Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel. The “East” became
once again a “starry expanse” which could not be accessed, and the “West” became a symbol of
futility, groping hopelessly for knowledge with which to survey the expanse of World Art. This
was not, as some contend, merely a maneuver by Hearn to exoticize “Japan”; it was a decision to
challenge Western omnipotence, echoing the rise of modernist literature, asserting from the
shallowness of Western rationalism a supernatural presence to dwarf man’s political and
scientific achievements. This absence, as we will explore, is captured in the very form of his
narratives. Hearn mused, “The systemization of human experience in no wise enlightens us as to
the Whence, the Whither, or worst of all - the Why!” (Hearn 1910, 154). The essence beneath
Hearn’s project was an indefinable but ubiquitous “Ghost.”

Hearn’s “Ghost”
Recollections gradually become indistinguishable from dreams. (Hearn 2001, 100)

Though like Fenollosa Hearn admired the Victorian rigor of evolutionists, he felt
something fundamental was missing in its substance. In one letter, he writes: “Natural selection
can explain but a very small part of the thing” (Bisland, 236). Hearn expressed a willingness to

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enter into the ongoing philosophical battle over which ideal the world should turn towards next.
Writing in a letter to one friend of “the beastly Hegel,” who he deemed “colourless,” Hearn
attempted to unsettle the audience by presenting idealism as an exercise in futility, offering in its
stead a sensation-based cosmology (438). He frequently labeled this phenomenon “Ghost.”
Appreciating bits and pieces of Japanese culture, Hearn imagined for Western readers a pseudoBuddhist void, an unstoppable accumulation of ancestors he believed was pushing living beings,
without their consent, into the future: “At such a moment, one feels indeed as if enveloped by
some monstrous sentiency, - suspended within some vital substance that feels and sees and wills
alike in every part, - an infinite soft cold Ghost” (Hearn 2005, 237). Hearn’s occasionally crude
marriage of Buddhism, Japanese mythology, and older Romantic traditions based in Gothic and
French literature revolved around the shortcomings of Western systems of rational thought. As a
result, the reader faces modernity with a dissolving certainty over whether or not there is a larger
force guiding the way. It is upon this dizziness Hearn, and the literary modernists, came to thrive.
Hearn and Fenollosa’s discourses of the invisible suggested two possible methods with
which Westerners might redefine their relationships with the supernatural. These methods were
at least partially forged in direct exchanges between the two men. After visiting a Fenollosa
exhibition in Tokyo, Hearn writes to him in a letter, “Nothing excited in me any desire to possess
it, even as a gift, except the Kappa and the Shoki. (I know I am hopeless - but it were hopeless to
try to be otherwise)” (Bisland, 382). The Kappa and Shoki, Gothic-type figures in Japanese
mythology, could not be deemed “perfection” by the venerable “Professor” (Hearn’s nickname
for Fenollosa) because they emphasized sentiment over didacticism, focusing on the secrets of
the universe instead of finding the answers to its riddles.
Hearn’s “Ghost” was less “spiritually elevating” and resisted harmony to instead

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manipulate affect. The works did not follow rules of post-Renaissance painting, portraying
subject matter exaggerated and crude to a “refined” Western sensibility. Fenollosa, ruling the
highest merit appears in classical Japanese artwork, read these grotesqueries as symptomatic of a
closed-door policy in Japan, and insisted they could never be appreciated as “great art”: “So in
Hokusai, there is no lack of solid artistic construction; but in his themes we miss some last
perfection of fibre” (Fenollosa 2009, 100). Fenollosa’s Hearn’s method, like artwork depicting
Kappa and Shoki, held a suggestive, rather than self-fulfilling, style. Hearn embraced the
“grotesque” elements in Japanese aesthetics (ironically, in ways similar to the architecture of
Catholic churches he adamantly disliked but nevertheless frequently returned to in his work).39
At the boundaries of literary form, a sublime “Japan” could remind the Western populace of
what lay beyond their quotidian understanding or the reach of their purchasing power.
The Hearnian “Ghost” exists in fragments, fostered by the “suggestiveness” he
interpreted in Japanese art during the Edo period. While living in Japan, his style grew more and
more sparse, a technique later adopted by the early modernists to capture the limits of Western
language and re-establish the promises of sublimity without. Hearn appreciates “teaching the
ghostliness of all substance - granite or gossamer - just as those lately found x-rays make visible
the ghostliness of flesh” (Hearn 2009, 58). Hearn’s tale for Western readers, rather than the
embodiment of some grand Ideal, is a material text to be dissected by the relentless tide of the
cosmos. Hearn states, “Dissolution must come; all integration must yield to disintegration”
(Hearn 1910, 143). According to Hearn, the mysterious content of Japanese art defies Western
attempts to claim mastery over it: “Of Substance-in-itself we have not any knowledge” (265). He
painted his interpretations of Japanese culture with a language of mystery and awe, strangely
reminiscent of the Old Testament verses which had filled his childhood with trepidation.40 Here

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Hearn introduces what Jameson labels as “nascent modernism,” a fantastic whose subject is not
metaphysical fullness but emptiness at the heart of material expansion. Hearn lamented a
vanishing that might reveal this abyss: “(Phantoms) filled all things with a sense and motion of
invisible life, - they made both terror and beauty. Now there are no ghosts, no angels and demons
and gods: all are dead” (Allen and Wilson, 274).
Hearn preferred the speculative realm of dreams and therefore pushed the reader beyond
his words on the page. This is provocatively suggested in drafts of his writing, in which at one
point he scratches out the term “classical,” rich in Hegelian significance, and instead uses the
term “antiquarian” (Clifton Waller, Reel 1, 0319). He declares: “Our ideals of beauty can have
only a value relative to conditions that are constantly changing. Real and ideal alike are
transitory” (Hearn 2007, 197). This proto-modernist refusal aligns with Hearn’s detachment from
the object of his studies; “Ghost,” in other words, emerge ripe with potential – but this potential
is denied from his modern, alienated state. Hearn scholar George Hughes notes, “In Hearn’s
world the ghosts may come, but they come to the Japanese, and not to Hearn. The kindly
ancestral ghosts are not those of his ancestors. The circle which they look over and guard is one
from which Hearn is excluded” (Hughes, 128 emphasis mine). The quest for Japanese artifacts as
conveyors of cultural truth was dismissed as merely quixotic, a lesson Hearn learned during his
time in Japan. “Ghost,” he reiterated, can never be contained.
Man’s construction of History, including his “promising future,” was for Hearn a speck
of dust in a swirling cosmos. He seeks a supernatural entity to transcend man’s meager
knowledge. Spencer too pondered the “Unknowable”: “an all-pervading ether… we know not
what the ether is…it is impossible to fathom” (Spencer, 196). Hearn’s characters are constantly
reminded of their insignificance, as the past and future bleed recklessly into the present (a theme

56

we will return to in the later chapter focusing on filmmaker Shimizu Takashi):

The ghost in each of us must have passed through the burning of a million suns, - must
survive the awful vanishing of countless future universes. May not Memory somehow
and somewhere also survive? Are we sure that in ways and forms it does not? As Infinite
Vision, - remembrance of the Future in the Past? (Hearn 1910, 263, emphasis mine)
A personal favorite of Hearn’s, “Fragment” is a tale of a pilgrim led on a trek up an arduous and
mysterious mountainside. At long last the pilgrim comes to a terrible revelation: “a trembling
seized him, - and a ghostly fear. For there was not any ground, - neither beneath him nor about
him nor above him, - but a heaping only, monstrous and measureless, of skulls and fragments of
skulls and dust of bone” (Hearn 2005, 5). The skulls represent his incalculable past lives, turning
to dust beneath the heels of time. The pilgrim’s confidence in his perceptions is shaken as he
faces Eternity. Even more interesting is the anxiety created by the skulls that still exist before
him; the future returns to haunt him as well, a fictional manifestation of the “remembrance of the
future in the past.” This is an anachronistic haunting, mutating the Western language of
“progress,” any clear trajectory or linear vision of History, into an uncontainable vision of
boundless energies. Interestingly, Hearn first heard this story from Fenollosa’s wife, Mary. He
modified her version, nevertheless, to fit more overtly with his version of the Japanese sublime.
The only certainty for Hearn, as the story demonstrates, was man’s precarious position, perched
on a mountainside. Dissatisfied with Western discussions of phenomenology he encounters,
Hearn erects from his personal interpretation of Eastern thought a sobering mountain of skulls.
Hearnian characters face the bottomless, and ceiling-less, excesses repressed by their
rendering of modernization. Hearn professes a sort of “double-consciousness” at work: “I have

57

the double sensation of being myself a ghost and of being haunted” (Hearn 2009, 59). He is
haunted by an ancient instinct as well as by an unnerving sense that, within the expanse of the
cosmos, his life is insignificant:

Today we have ceased to be consciously afraid of the unseen; - knowing that we
ourselves are supernatural, - that even the physical man, with all his life of sense, is more
ghostly than any ghost of old imagining; but some dim inheritance of the primitive fear
still slumbers in our being, and waken perhaps, like an echo, to the sound of the wail in
the night. (Hearn 2005, 237)

Hearn points directly at something akin to “Spirit” and modern man’s confidence in this
supernatural endowment guiding him out into the world. In reaction, Hearn reminds the reader of
a lingering fear, the sense that when faced with the Eternal vastness of existence, he is but a
piece of dust. Modernity, for Hearn, exposes the barrenness within man’s familiar narratives of
materialist “progress,” including those of Fenollosa.
Hearn’s literary alternative to “Spirit” manifests itself in his lack of narrative closure. He
was fond of concluding his tales by denying the reader the morally satisfactory conclusion of
Western legends: “But, no! - I really cannot tell you with what it was filled” (61). Narrative
complexity for Hearn was secondary to sensation. Drawing on dream images for inspiration,
tales such as “Mujina” function only to be frightening, hence the simplicity of the text itself. The
narrator confronts a “faceless” ghost, “with no eyes or nose or mouth” (Hearn 1971, 79). Upon
fleeing to a soba shop, he finds yet another faceless ghost, “which therewith became like unto an
Egg. And, simultaneously, the light went out” (80). If the Western reader expects a moral in the
story, or some sense of authority over her narrative, she is once again looking in the wrong place.
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Hearn’s Western reader has a duty to stop attempting to fit the pieces of the puzzle together and
instead prostrate before the unwieldy “Unseen.”
Hearn’s notebooks are filled with diligent commentary on his constructions of an
alternative teleology, one highlighting limits in order to expand his reader’s consciousness via
fictive cartographies. He explains why he was first drawn toward Japanese “unfinished” tales by
likening the sensation they create to climbing a ruined tower and finding it still in progress or
getting lost in the streets of London and coming to a “blind wall.” “If you have had any of these
experiences, you have doubtless had a sensation not unlike those made by some kinds of
Japanese stories” (Clifton Waller, Reel 5, 0096). He utilized Western metaphors such as regal
towers and London bypasses to enforce his skepticism, imagining a confident Western man,
marching through “progress,” and coming to an unexpected blockade: “And, simultaneously, the
lights went out.”
Though he argued it may be impossible to fathom, Hearn’s advance of “ether” must not
be mistaken as nihilism. Fascinated by the spiritual great wave as it wistfully retreated from
shore, Hearn likewise contemplated the inner-workings of the tides. Attempting to provide an
alternative explanation of cosmic forces, Hearn did not relish long in chaos. He assumed there
was a logic hidden deep within mankind’s development, though it was impossible for mere
41

mortals to visualize.

Forecasting Yeats (with whom he corresponded), Pound, and other early

modernists, Hearn’s stylized absences simultaneously expand the senses of the reader, fueling
what can be read as a growth of imperial longing to possess every kernel of Truth, scattered
across the globe.
As with Fenollosa and Spencer before him, and Yanagita following afterward, Hearn
cannot avoid the trap of modernity: to reason with the “Unseen.” His reliance upon the works of

59

late Romantics causes him to pivot on occasion from the beautiful negativity he produces to
frame instead a sterile, nostalgic overview. In “The Conservative,” Hearn tells the tale of a young
Japanese samurai who travels to the West in search of enlightenment. Upon his return, the
samurai is disheartened, proclaiming: “That world had no faith” (Hearn 2007, 119). Hearn’s
work provides an alternative to a secular worldview he perceived as losing its belief in higher
powers but does so, at times, in dogmatic fashion. The result was that in sublime “Japan,” the
Western reader, like the samurai returning home, could once again have faith. Hearn’s texts, at
the same time they celebrate the thrilling sensations of absence, offer a thinly-veiled assertion of
a Romantic presence. His reader can still re-envision their identity by glimpsing, amidst the
vacuum, a deeply-buried Origin, quickly fading over distant shores - hence the tacit promotion of
a drive towards imperial satisfaction, always-already embedded in the commercial venues where
42

Hearn’s works made their profit.

Hearn’s status as nomad, a fascination among scholars interested in his work, complicates
his connection to “nascent modernism” while affirming an overlap between early modernism and
the imperialist project. The Irish identity Hearn scholar Sean Ronan promotes, as well as Hearn’s
personal association with the French West Indies, not to mention his experiences as a homeless
man and his socially-condemned marriage to an African-American in Cincinnati, suggests a
possible affiliation with entrapment within hegemonic domains and hints at an accompanying
anxiety concerning a perceived emptiness behind materialist expansion and exploitation. His
employment as a travel writer, however, divulges an unconscious (or inevitable) complacency
within a broadening imperial schema.

43

Trying to tease apart the link between modernism and

imperialism, Jameson writes: “If ‘infinity’ (and ‘imperialism’) are bad or negative in (E.M.)
Forster, its perception, as a bodily and poetic process, is no longer that, but rather a positive
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achievement and an enlargement of our sensorium” (Jameson 2007, 163 emphasis mine). In
sum, the “blind walls” of the London metropolis Hearn refers to can be construed in two ways:
as a “prison,” symbolizing the modern condition and providing glimpses of a ghostly alternative
- or as the aestheticizing of a bad “infinity,” fostering aspirations within an ever-expanding
modern world.

An Ambivalent Zeitgeist
Cultural historian T.J. Jackson Lears writes of the turn of the century as being, in multiple
senses, “Janus-faced.” Fenollosa’s excessively optimistic histories and Hearn’s proto-modernist
fictions actually make available two sides of the same project, though each author struggled with
the mutual admiration they felt for one another, on a personal and professional level, and failed
to admit part of their respective project was reflected in the style of the other. These particular
authors demonstrate how, during this period of American expansion, renderings of supernatural
forces either supporting or reacting against concepts of “progress” overlapped with one another.
Modernity in Western countries, as in Japan, recapitulates phantasms within its most
“progressive” doctrines. This phenomenon is labeled frequently in Asian Studies scholars such
as H.D. Harootunian as “uneven.”
One might simultaneously frame this in terms compatible with certain articulations of
Western metaphysics, actively applied by each figure. With “Japan,” Hearn and Fenollosa sought
two variations of a single Notion (thing-in-itself), to expand – or, in their minds, to “conclude” –
Western Understanding, in the very least, of the archipelago. Yet what they portray, by necessity,
remains mere Essence. While ruptures of genuine uncertainty do emerge in the words of both,
the tendencies of late Romanticism weight heavily upon these initial breaks, separating their

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discovery of a productive spectrality from familiar, staged projections such as the ones featured
in Orientalist exotica. To put this differently, in so far as Hearn and Fenollosa sought reified
meaning in the Far East, they left us with forms more symbolic than historical. Lingering in
traces, one can retrospectively find a missed revelation in their works: achieving any concrete
apprehension of “Ghost” or “Spirit” is a futile endeavor from the start, unveiling more about the
44

cosmopolitan consciousness than about its object.

Laszlo K. Gefin comments on one of

Pound’s editorial omissions in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, “Pound’s
deletion of the passage on the harmony of metaphoric overtones is, of course, revealing…
obviously the poet, who from his earliest research on had been attempting to move beyond
metaphor, was not impressed by harmonies and overtones” (Gefin, 23). Fenollosa’s moments of
reliance upon previously established metaphors and “overtones,” much like Hearn’s reliance
upon clichéd tropes from his Romantic forbearers, is perhaps the strongest contributor to the lack
of critical interest concerning their work; correspondingly, they are regarded as “Orientalists”
and receive mere passing mention in much of contemporary scholarship. Early renderings of the
Far East expose a type of picture-thinking, a magic lantern show with no conceivable end. While
their works occasionally pause to offer a fecund meditation on the dynamism of metaphysics,
neither were able to step back from their personal interchanges to gain a clearer vantage point on
unfolding forms emerging between them.

45

Only with Mary McNeil Fenollosa, as we will see in

the follow chapter, does one gain a more thorough introspection on the import of this spectral
phenomenon in the broader project of representing “Japan” for Western audiences.
As I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter, it would be specious to read Hearn and
Fenollosa’s “magical narratives” as simple shifts away from older teleology to a proto-modernist
sense of fantasy. Concluding there would be to risk overlooking the complexities of their texts.
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Rather, discourses of the invisible articulated by early Japanologists reveal divisions within
American discourse, a sense of spirituality blurring in aesthetic movements abroad. Literary
critic Tom Lutz submits, “We, with our cosmopolitan ability to comprehend multiple
perspectives, see all these possibilities, and we are absolved from specifically endorsing any one;
we are allowed, in effect, to have our faith and deny it too” (Lutz, 115). To comprehend fully
subsequent discourse between the two cultures, this dynamism cannot, and should not, be stilled.
For, in the end, this offers one a tentative answer to Figal’s initial prompt – perhaps the interplay
of “Ghosts” and “Spirits” does illuminate a crucial aspect of modernity not only in Japan, but in
the United States as well.

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The Eternal Embrace
Ghostly Maidens in Sidney McCall’s Fiction

In turn of the nineteenth century popular discourse, “Japan” was constructed for the
American imagination in innumerable ways. As elucidated in the previous chapter, Fenollosa and
Hearn advocated distinct approaches to the archipelago: Fenollosa calling for a synthesis of the
“East/West” dialectic to result in a Utopian universal and Hearn, an ardent late Romantic and
proto-modernist, employing “Ghosts” to re-affirm the mystique of the Far East and remind
Western man of his humble origins.

46

Their work oscillated between urges to possess, literally

and figuratively, other cultures and a need to introduce something that could not be possessed, a
poetic alternative to a modern life they saw as suffering from over-industrialization and a
shrinking vitality. Sidney McCall, with an innovative approach and first-hand knowledge of the
two cultures, wanted to bridge the gap between these divided rhetorical approaches to “Japan.”
The wife of Fenollosa and close friend of Hearn, though vastly unrecognized for her
contributions, suggests a way in which “Japan” can exist as both a symbol of moral progress and
a phantasm to unsettle – and revitalize – Western culture. Through this debate, she seeks to
reconcile divided notions of “femininity” in the American imagination and provide a way in
which a “maternal West” and “mystical East” can find their way into an eternal embrace without
relying upon stagnant abstractions.
Sidney McCall, the pseudonym for Mary McNeil Fenollosa, first met Fenollosa at the
Boston Museum of Fine Art, where she was hired to serve as his assistant curator to the Japanese
art collection in 1894. Their romance culminated in marriage and a joint venture to Japan.
During this time abroad and throughout their married life, Fenollosa and McCall worked side by
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side in their scholarly pursuits.47 She dedicated her novel The Dragon Painter to her husband’s
adopted Japanese title, Kano Yeitan. McCall shared Fenollosa’s fascination with idealism and
spent many nights with him diligently studying Hegel’s works.48 Evidence can be found in her
fiction as well as her introduction to Fenollosa’s Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, which was,
after his death, carefully pieced together at McCall’s hand:
Artists and writers seem to have taken their point of view through partisanship.
Classicists and Goths flew at each other’s throats… real variations are as infinite as the
human spirit, though educed by social and spiritual changes, we come to grasp the real
and larger unity of effort. (Fenollosa 1912, xxiv)
It is difficult to extricate where Fenollosa’s words end and McCall’s begin; one quickly
recognizes their shared pursuit of an idealist philosophy.49
McCall was also a friend of the elusive Hearn, meeting him upon her sojourn in Japan.
Though Fenollosa likewise enjoyed Hearn’s enthusiasm for Japanese aesthetics, McCall’s bond
with Hearn was stronger. Hearn writes in a letter to her: “How pleasant to know that there is
somebody to whom I can send a book hereafter with a tolerable certainty of pleasing!” (Bisland,
437). While Fenollosa had little patience for intangible “Ghosts,” McCall recognized that, in
order to progress forward, the West would first have to confront the so-called “anti-modernist
East” Japanologists, including Hearn and even Fenollosa on occasion, were manufacturing.
Hearn commends her: “You understand my wishes to do something new” (403). For McCall,
higher truth would be found in the working out of these divisive ideas, in the ways Americans
came to understand their relationship to the new Japanese art forms and what they revealed to
them about their sensibilities.50 She called for mutual recognition between the “Classicists” and

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the “Goths.” Her fiction shows dismay at the “globe-trotting” manner in which Japanese cultural
artifacts were being consumed, especially among women McCall held were decorating their
homes with Japanese artifacts in an un-sophisticated, thoughtless manner. The little or no
agreement on a “proper” methodology toward Japanese aesthetics was a central impetus for the
message behind her novels.
Many Americans were engaging in cosmopolitanism at the turn of the century, intent on
discovering a cultural sensitivity for sale in the Far East. They found in these purchases
something they believed either never existed in America, perpetuated by a nagging insecurity
that the nation lacked culture, or was currently eroding in the move toward industrialization. For
this group, Japanese aesthetics offered a sense of artistic refinement. Imports such as ukiyo-e
prints opened a window allowing writers Hearn and Fenollosa to borrow a past that was not their
own in support of cultural “progress.” Yet the need to temper this sensitivity with displays of
overt mastery as Western authorities plagued the two Japanologists. This ambivalence was
repeatedly gendered as the “masculine” side of their project, carrying a big stick and a scientific
lens, was viewed as morally progressing with paternalistic confidence while the “feminine,” antimodernist side, in contrast, was viewed as rejuvenating modern life with lyrical poetics
“borrowed” from the Far East. Mari Yoshihara notes, “The powerful West was associated with
virile masculinity, and the subordinate East with passive femininity” (Yoshihara, 4). In previous
scholarship, such as Christopher Benfrey’s The Great Wave, male Japanologists are recognized
as suffering from an internal conflict, constructed as a conflict between their “feminine” and
“masculine” sensibilities, over the “appropriate” rhetorical approach to Japan.51 McCall was a
female Japanologist who suffered from the same frustrations but whose original application of an

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idealist framework to the study of the archipelago as well as its attendant gender conflicts
allowed her to approach the problem from a markedly different perspective.
However, McCall, like many of her female contemporaries, was excluded from
membership in erudite social circles and denied a public role in this debate. She was, and
continues to be today, relegated to the status of “secretary,” referenced almost exclusively not as
an author, but as the widow who dutifully gathered Ernest’s notes. Against such limitations,
Yoshihara notes, discourse concerning the Orient offered white female writers “an effective
avenue through which to become part of a dominant American ideology and to gain authority
and agency which were denied to them in other realms of sociopolitical life” (Yoshihara, 6).
McCall joined these writers in their pursuit of literary liberation at the hands of a fantasized
“East.” Larry Chisolm adds, “(McCall) hoped to make a place for herself among the literary
ladies who wrote sentimental novels and practiced a higher journalism in lengthy notes on social
and intellectual events” (Chisolm, 120). One can find traces of unrest in her ambition, the unrest
common among most writers interested in Japan – the desire to be “literary,” “sentimental,” as
well as a factual recorder of everyday happenings. She was a product of her age, divided
internally over sweeping social concerns; her interests in everything from poetry to science to
spiritualism, and the intersections in-between, were brimming with dialectical energy.52 She
spent much of her life attempting to sort these energies out in the pages of her fiction. The topic
of “Japan” provided one possible arena in which she could express her philosophical
perspectives, in a forum socially acceptable for fin-de-siecle women: the novel.
Before specifically addressing McCall’s approach to “Japan,” it is essential to note the
difference in literary form between her husband, Hearn, and herself. By appreciating this
difference, one might begin to recognize the significance of McCall as a mediator between the
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styles of the two men and as an innovative artist in her own right. Fenollosa did not produce any
substantial text during his lifetime; it was McCall and Pound who later adapted his notes and
utilized them for multiple ends. Prior to this, the majority of his scholarship existed as
annotations for art exhibitions, lecture notes, and memos to museum administrators. Hearn’s
texts, in contrast, were fragmented bits of miscellany. His few attempts at novel-writing were
admittedly failures, dissolving into excessive description and abandoning plot altogether.53 The
form of the novel, though habitually dismissed by academics of the period as the genre of choice
for “sentimental females,” allows McCall to accomplish an innovation Hearn and Fenollosa
could not: to hybridize their ideals, to re-create Fenollosa’s progressive narratives while retaining
the enjoyable and, for her, philosophically invaluable emphasis on dissatisfaction from Hearn’s
“ghostly tales.”
Unlike her male contemporaries, McCall, a female writer at the turn of the century, could
delve into the “mystical” elements she linked to Japanese art without the expectation of – or,
more accurately, freedom to – produce a paternal ethos. Christine Guth observes that American
women “expressed themselves by writing of their experiences (with Japan), often with
considerable verve and interpretive insight” (Guth, 26). Overlooking this point, it was largely
expected that women writers would focus on these “fanciful matters” and not the political
questions held to be the near exclusive property of the male-dominated academy. The challenge
for McCall was in utilizing her perceived access to an Eastern “feminine mystique” against such
oppressive expectations while simultaneously supporting the idealist agenda she shared with
male intellectuals such as her husband. Historian Kristin Hoganson examines the ways in which
“Orientalist design as a means of female liberation” offered cosmopolitan women the
opportunity to “escape” from traditional domesticity; McCall, in contrast, was interested in how
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such “Orientalist designs,” often radically unfamiliar to Western audiences, could help women
come to terms with the desired and/or prescribed role of “maternal caregiver” (Hoganson, 31). At
the same time as the Far East allowed liberation through its “mystique,” it allowed McCall to
expound upon her a belief in the role of woman as mother-figure for civilization. She
subsequently attempted to negotiate a radical “feminine mysticism” with a more conservative
“maternalism” vis-à-vis dialectical encounters with “Japan.”
By the 1890s, many women, including McCall, were dealing with increased uncertainty
over their proper role in a nascent American empire. In the years before McCall’s journey to
Japan, scholar Amy Kaplan contends “women (had) the work of purging both themselves and
their homes of foreignness” (Kaplan, 47). In contrast to Kaplan’s earlier subjects, McCall as a
female artist and intellectual who strove to find a way of retaining foreignness within herself
(and the home) as a source of individual liberation while also supporting the stability she viewed
in the domestic realm. To do so, at certain moments she produced the specter of “femininity” as
potentially disrupting the oppressive male gaze; at other points, she viewed this “unreal” specter
as complimenting a positivist development in America. Undaunted by contradiction, McCall
used the popular theme of “East meets West” in hopes of resolving latent tensions between how
a “feminine Japan” was being envisioned by Japanologists as both a threat to, and cure for, the
ills of modern man. Theorist Georg Lukács, in The Theory of the Novel (1971), appreciates a
potentiality in the form of the novel McCall harnesses in order to express this contradiction in
productive ways: “The composition of the novel is the paradoxical fusion of heterogeneous and
discrete components into an organic whole which is then abolished over and over again” (Lukács,
84). According to Lukács, the ideal form of the novel manifests a Hegelian system engaged in
constant “self-correction.” For McCall, this means, throughout the course of the text, overcoming
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the limited subjectivity of those who first see “Japan” as pure abstraction (Hearn) while,
simultaneously, never allowing this transcendence to reach the point of reified self-certainty
(Fenollosa).
Yet examples of this dynamism can also be found in McCall’s examination of
“femininity” in her poetry. In “The Two Homes,” McCall compares her flower gardens in
America and Japan as gendered spaces and how they reveal the double nature of woman: “Live I,
love I, tend and sew / much as Western women do. / Yet the life is richer far, / Owning thus a
double star” (McCall 1899, 64). Exotic Eastern flowers enrich the life of a domestic Western
woman, affording the opportunity for duplicity in nature. According to McCall, woman is
intangible in her essence but solid in her duties. “Three Women” describes wife, mother, and
artist, what McCall sees as the three major roles of the female. In her final couplet, she sums up
her dialectical approach: “‘Clear types,’ you say, ‘and strangely set apart.’ / Look deeper, friend,
‘tis but one woman’s heart” (110). The solution of “one heart” was developed at length in her
fiction, where, via the form of the novel, she attempted to work systematically through this
problem.
McCall’s resolution for overcoming the limitations of Fenollosa’s idealism and Hearn’s
“ghostly” resistance (positions they wavered on themselves) was a rare recognition of the interconnection within their respective styles. The pattern of her novels introduces an Eastern specter
to her Western characters, a specter endowed with an “Unknowable” essence that exudes poetic
sensitivity, a trope she favored together with Hearn. This encounter forces her male
cosmopolitan characters to confront unsettling manifestations of their “feminine” nature. McCall
dialectically moves her Western reader towards recognition that such abstract confrontations are
wholly insufficient in the modern age. Her conclusions promote a healing “maternal mystique”
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based in “Japan,” in which the “feminine” can remain a source of creative longing while
evolving into a source of stability within the household. This compulsion, for McCall at her most
Hegelian, cannot be resolved but instead gives life to the otherwise shallow enterprise of
Japonisme. This examination of the “feminine” in early twentieth century America, though not
entirely successful as an alternative to Western progressive doctrines, as we will examine at the
conclusion of the essay, enabled McCall to reflect on the question of “femininity” against the
popular backdrop of the Far East.
Projecting Japanese “Ghosts”
“Oh, I feel in my bones that it is going to be a ghost story, a real one,” whispered
Gwendolen, with a shiver of excitement. (McCall 1905, 148)
The Orient, according to theorist Naoki Sakai, perpetually serves as the “shadow of the
West” for Western writers (Sakai, 173). “Japan” is encountered in these works as a landscape
where the “Unknown” comes into contact with the material realm. In McCall’s The Breath of the
Gods, for example, Gwendolen the American protagonist proclaims it to be, upon first seeing the
archipelago, a “phantom land” (McCall 1905, 85). McCall positions the “East” as a romantic
nightmare for her Western cosmopolitans, onto which the characters project all of the self-doubts
at work in turn of the century America. The symbolic event is endowed with a significant
number of social anxieties, including the loss of a poetic sensitivity at the hands of rational
science. This Other was, for McCall, the object most unlike the overly-confident male imperialist
being portrayed in American discourse at that time: a female ghost from the Far East.54
Truth Dexter is a Victorian tale of unrequited love, in which there is a lingering unease
that the two lovers - allegories for a divided “America” after a bitter period of Reconstruction -

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may never (re)unite. The novel opens with a divided “America”: Craighead, the masculine
lawyer from Boston, and Truth, the innocent young girl from the South. The story centers around
their relationship and the various external forces that threaten to drive them apart. Craighead
epitomizes chauvinistic values associated with the imperial “West.” He boldly asks, “Are we a
nation of men, - or of charlatans?” (McCall 1901, 7). Craighead the Northerner, civilized and
ambitious, opens the novel as the newly-appointed legal advisor to a fading Southern family. The
Southern characters are everything that Craighead is not. The grandchild, Truth, “believes in
fairies yet” and relishes in Nature, loathing urban life (86). “America” appears through McCall to
be a nation torn between “ghostliness” in the Old South, with its moss-covered trees and lost
ancestors, and the all-knowing stance of the North. Forced to marry as a matter of logistics, the
couple faces each other as strangers throughout the opening of the novel.
Orchid, the beautiful but dangerous antagonist, materializes as an eerie presence amidst
assorted Eastern curios; in a far-from-subtle allusion to Japan, she is also located on a private
island. Craighead is both drawn toward and repulsed from this living spirit: “It was not so much
the ghost of his boyish ideals, as the danger alarm ringing through the last moments of a dream,
that now haunted him. With all her frankness Orchid had ever remained elusive, a mystery” (5).
She serves as a demon lurking in the margins of his married life, attempting to pull the allAmerican couple apart and ruthlessly deny the possibility of future love between the two.
Craighead’s initial voyage to the South was meant to “exorcise the spectre” of Orchid (36).
Instead, the specter continues to mock his efforts. She whispers to him: “Ghosts can be exorcised
only by being faced and defied” (222). To Craighead, Orchid’s Otherness is ever-alluring,
tempting him to pursue global acquisition as an alternative to his dull and burdensome married
life.
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Orchid is also a symbol of “nothingness,” a crudely-perceived Buddhism run amuck, one
trope captivating the American imagination at that time.55 Mirroring questions surrounding
gender identity, the Japanese Buddhism arriving at world exhibitions was viewed by some as a
risk, especially to those seeking religious certainty. On the other hand, this imagined
“nothingness” was an exhilarating alternative to the traditions of quotidian modern life. Orchid
“worshipped it all in a sort of pagan ecstasy” (McCall 1901, 188). Her presence is repeatedly
compared to the Old South, and yet the depth of what Orchid offers unnerves. Truth is linked
with serene ponds, calm and poetic; Orchid, in contrast, is linked to the mighty sea. Truth, fearful
of what this sea is capable of, states that “it laughs and pretends to play at the edges, but out there,
in the deep part, it don’t laugh. Somehow it always makes fun of you for tryin’ to be good” (88).
Orchid’s Eastern nihilism aligns with the imagined terror of an immoral Other, gendered as a
type of “feminine sublime.” It threatens to drag Truth away, to separate violently the elements of
the Western consciousness – the gentle femininity of Southern Truth and the rugged
individualism of Northern Craighead.
It was not that Craighead had forecast it, this mockery of marriage, this mere pleasant
duty of domestic proximity. Neither had he desired, for alternative, a wild defiance of
society’s mandates, a Sicilian outlawry of romantic passion. Strange that his fate should
be cast between two such abortive extremes! Orchid and Truth! Siren and sister! The
evanescent mockery of the flame itself, and of its shadow! (181)
The “West” faces its shadow in Truth Dexter, the immaterial and boundless “East,” and
consequently loses all bearing. The encounter with Orchid, the fleeting Japanese “Ghost,”
threatens to separate the “feminine” from the “masculine,” “South” from “North.”

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In The Breath of the Gods, these dialectical forces appear in an even greater number of
allegorical characters. Gwendolen, the admirable American beauty, and Yuki, the Japanese girl
of a “thousand tantalizing forms”; the individualistic senator Todd and the patriotic prince
Hagane; sensitive Gwendolen and imperialist American Dodge; the aesthetically-obsessed
Frenchman Pierre and the militaristic Hagane; even Yuki is divided between her American and
Japanese loyalties, her Christian and Buddhist upbringing, and her desires of “love” to Pierre and
“duty” to Hagane (McCall 1905, 11). The form of the novel reflects this ambivalence, shifting
between lyrical abstraction and frank commentary on American politics in Asia.
The plot revolves around Yuki, a Japanese girl educated in America, and the struggle to
possess her between two strong-willed men: the artistic Frenchman Pierre and the aged Prince
Hagane of Japan. Yuki serves as an idol for the two lovers: a symbol of unfulfilled desire to
Pierre and a symbol of national honor to Hagane. Yuki is quite literally pulled apart between her
role as an aesthetic “Ghost” and a physical embodiment of the national “Spirit.” At one point in
the narrative, Hagane displays a gruesome painting to Yuki and Pierre (Gwendolen, as will be
discussed later in the chapter, observes). The painting, foreshadowing the struggle between the
two men over Yuki, becomes unnerving to everyone in the group with the exception of the two
men. They delight in its passions:
The thing glowed wet and fresh, like new-spilled blood. Before its artistic wonder was
the wonder of vitality, for the image lived, - not in a world of heavy human flesh, nor in
realms ethereal, but in some raging holocaust where the two worlds chafe and meet. (151)
Pierre and Hagane are in the midst of a “raging holocaust” over what “Japan” will come to mean
in the twentieth century, as an iconic “Ghost” meant to inspire global art or a sacrificial body to

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capture the raging “Spirit” of Japanese nationalism. The concepts are equally foreboding. “Half
in the world of poetry, half in the material present, she wavered” (275).
The dichotomy is inspired by the ambiguous rhetoric of the Japanologists. For McCall,
these ambivalent forces consistently come to rest on the fragmented body of a female phantom.
The dénouement of The Breath of the Gods involves such a body, shrouded in white robes and a
Gothic atmosphere of cackling ravens. Pierre bargains with Hagane and in exchange for a
document he has stolen, Hagane will forfeit Yuki, his legal wife. The two parties meet to
complete the transaction on a lonely roadside; in a carriage, “the black hood, bent far over the
front, completely conceals the occupant” (418). Pierre approaches, full of hope for an artistic life
together with his possession, and holds her gently: “And your little hands are cold! Why do you
not speak, my love? Are you trying to frighten me?” Hagane, moving in the shadows, utters:
“‘She wishes the dagger not removed, monsieur. It keeps her sacrificial robes - immaculate.’
Hagane spoke like a machine.” Pierre, with a look of frenzy, cries out: “Who is that that speaks
to me? Has night a voice? What spirit hides behind that mask?” To which Hagane replies, calmly,
“Death” (420). The scene offers an unfinished, Hearnian moment. Is “Japan” to be a “Ghost,” an
impossible lover for the world’s art community? Or a martyr, as Hagane himself declares, in
which the material realm is publicly sacrificed? The Romantic and the militant finally receive
what they have wanted all along in their idea of “Japan”: not a real woman, but an ideal to haunt
them and inspire them in their respective positions.
McCall’s “ghostly” encounters reveal Hearn’s influence, though her intention was
distinct from Hearn’s pessimism that a grand narrative could be recognized by mankind. Sakai
reads the impulse within the Western imagination to seek out Otherness as an attempt to reaffirm its position in the world: “(The West) is always urged to approach others in order to
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ceaselessly transform its self-image; it continually seeks itself in the midst of interaction with the
Other” (Sakai, 154). He proceeds, “the idea of progress or historicism would be unintelligible
without reference to this continual search for the Self, a ceaseless process of re-centering” (171
emphasis mine). Sakai critiques the use of pseudo-Hegelian historicism, a dialectical progress of
the Western mind, as an almost inescapable apparatus used to approach the “non-West.” By
utilizing evocative moments of terror in the “non-West” to reach idealist conclusions, McCall
follows the “inescapable apparatus”: “Japan” serves to “re-center” Western subjectivity by
forcing American characters to overcome the bifurcating forces within themselves (though, it
must be pointed out, while there is “progress” in this movement, abstraction never vanishes
altogether from the process – for McCall, it is simply re-situated, projected again and again).
Eastern Phantasm, Holy Matrimony
I care not for the ghost, the spirit, however pure. I want the wife I have lost. (McCall
2002, 236)
“Japan” as a trope in McCall’s novels unfolds in a systematic fashion. In Hegelian terms,
the imperial Western gaze begins as pure consciousness. Hegel defines this early stage as
follows: “It seeks its ‘other’, while knowing that it there possesses nothing else but itself: it seeks
merely its own infinitude” (Hegel, 111). In terms of “globe-trotting” in the early twentieth
century, raw consciousness assumes a priori cohesiveness and then recklessly casts its eyes out
over the globe. Here one recognizes Craighead, and his growing worldly ambitions, who “felt as
that his only possible outlook upon the universe was through the high gold rims of his own
eyeglasses” (McCall 1905, 173). The Other, in the form of the Far East, serves the function of a
flat object to be consumed, an example being the flood of Japanese curios such as those
surrounding Orchid, into American living rooms. The one-sided perspective emanating from the
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“West,” forcing an ill-conceived synthesis of world forces through consumption, leads to a
romanticized “East” re-assuring in its status as pure difference. At this point, the Western Self
has yet, in Hegel’s words, “to come back to itself from this state of estrangement” (Hegel, 25).
Hearn’s fiction provides an illustration of this crisis, mired in perpetual self-estrangement.
According to McCall, however, neither the “East/West” nor the “feminine/masculine”
dialectic will be content with Absolute Difference. The Western subject, at this point in the
narrative, is startled to discover the “Ghost” is – and has always been – the West’s shadow, the
hidden parts of itself it has been attempting to hunt out and understand. These parts have been
cast out to play the role of Other. The “Japanese female ghosts” are recognized as elements of
American culture perceived by some as internal threats, and others as evidence of something
beyond modern decay: “nothingness” and agnosticism, aesthetic sensitivity and refined tastes,
and, most prominently for McCall, a thrilling (but at its core, familiar) “femininity.”
“Japanese female ghosts” in McCall’s fiction are essential to her understanding of the
telos of Western civilization. Through engagement with these specters, McCall insists
cosmopolitan readers face the “Unknown,” recognize their role in introducing it as an imagined
Other, and then move towards reconciliation. In Truth Dexter, Truth is pulled away from
Craighead and toward her counterpart, Orchid. Addressing the art of the East, she exclaims: “I
never get tired of studying it. All that chaotic mystery… I can’t keep away from it! … how much
finer the pictures are unfinished!” (McCall 1901, 158). When she realizes Craighead’s secret lust
for Orchid, she retreats further into the abyss Orchid represents, identifying with the mystique
the women share as alternatives to Craighead’s pragmatism. The climax of the novel is
Craighead’s impending divorce from Truth, symbolizing a decisive schism within “America”
between its “feminine” and “masculine” aspects. Leaving Boston to wander in the woods of her
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Southern home, “her human body drifted, as it were, into a world of other dimensions… out of
the very hush of finite movement… she knew herself to be a mere sentient atom.” Through this
experience, Truth realizes her individuality and independence from Craighead: “What had she to
do with Craighead, culture, and Boston?” (320). Yet, she also recognizes the limit of this
“vegetative” escapism, telling her grandmother “it seems to me that we never do anything down
here but eat, and go to bed, and get up again” (334). Following the momentary union with
Orchid’s “Ghost,” the immaterial “nothingness” of her being, Truth begins to shape a nascent
identity. Within McCall’s novels, the nihilism of a “feminine mystique” will not do; nor will the
stiff and passion-less society of masculine Craighead and its empty consumption; it will rest in
an overcoming of the two, an alternative “America” co-existing with both its poetic sensibilities
and industrial ambitions.
Craighead likewise evolves over the course of the novel. His worldly ambitions fade, to a
degree, and he starts to miss the simple Truth. He goes to see his wife in the South, setting aside
his stubborn pride. His unsophisticated imperialism gives way to what McCall views as the
stronger bonds of nationalism. She writes in the preface to Truth Dexter she intended for the
book “to remain a picture of feelings and relations really subsisting between North and South
just before that crisis in our history which brought the two sections, let us hope forever, into a
common enthusiasm for a common national cause” (McCall 1901, preface). The (national)
family unit is unveiled as an alternative “America” for Truth: “Absurd as it may be, and archaic,
and in some sense, cruel; yet something may be said for a system which, in this pragmatic age,
can yield the possibility of a new Annunciation” (346). Truth re-unites with Craighead, forgiving
his temporary wander lust, intent on raising their child together with faith in the world to come.
McCall’s revised doctrine of “progress” centers on the theme of reproduction, in merging the
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seemingly disparate parts of the self-compass into a new “Annunciation” – “North” and “South,”
“East” and “West.”
The result for McCall, it must be emphasized, is not as vaguely conceived as her
husband’s “World Synthesis.” Kaplan examines the imperialism behind a synthesis such as
Fenollosa’s: “If America sees reflections of itself everywhere and strives to encompass the globe,
then it risks losing the boundaries between the domestic and the foreign that define the nation as
home” (Kaplan, 170). To preserve within domestic boundaries the familiar and the foreign,
McCall articulates a dialectic retaining difference while recognizing a higher connection between
the actors involved. She projects “Japanese female ghosts” to forge alliances within the nation
without erasing its tacit boundaries (an erasure McCall repeatedly critiques as being perpetrated
by naïve cosmopolitan “globe-trotters”). The figure of the “Ghost,” as in Hearn’s fiction,
reminds the reader they have limited knowledge and there are some things which elude the
Western grasp. Nevertheless, through this realization, the intricacies of the whole start to gain
clarity. Immediately preceding the conclusion to Truth Dexter, Craighead confronts the
temptation of Orchid for a final time. The two characters realize upon the meeting that, in
accordance to the famous Hegelian dictum, they have passed into their opposites. He tells her,
“You are not half so worldly and romantic as you think.” To which Orchid responds, “You are
not half so unworldly and high-minded as you think” (McCall 1901, 361). Craighead has been
forced to recognize and appreciate his romantic essence found in Truth, the South, and even
inside of himself. He does not, however, lose his individuality and convert completely into a
Hearnian dreamer; he retains his pragmatism in balance with a new-found poetic sensitivity. In
The Breath of the Gods, Yuki and Gwendolen, symbols of “East” and “West,” are recognized as
mutually exclusive and yet intimately connected: “both are perfection apart - and a vision of
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paradise together” (McCall 1905, 5). McCall sees these forces as distinct but mutually dependent
on one another. She promotes the necessity of unfamiliar “Ghosts” as well as maternal figures in
the search for a unified “American identity.”
In The Breath of the Gods, the Todd family offer another allegory of American culture
divided between its “masculine” and “feminine” impulses. They actively listen to the ghost story
occurring all around them. This prompts them to turn inward to the unrest taking place in their
native country. Dodge, agent of chauvinistic imperialism, and Gwendolen, lover of all things
beautiful, spend the bulk of the novel in a quarrel, during which Dodge is lured away by Carmen,
the Spanish maiden (an allusion to the Spanish-American War). Over the course of Yuki’s plight,
however, they are drawn back together. Dodge re-assures her: “But all I can offer now is myself. Come to me, darling, put your poor tired little head against me, and let me try and
comfort you” (363). Through witnessing Yuki’s figurative dismemberment between Pierre and
Hagane, a shadow of their unrequited desire for one another, the two Americans begin to reassemble themselves into a family unit, a more cohesive national identity.
One follows Senator Todd, appointed as a neutral party in the forthcoming transaction
over Yuki’s body, step by step as he begins to recall the dialectical development he has observed
while in Japan. His vision clears as he reasons it through: “Here were the meeting-places of the
living and the dead. Here the two worlds answered, face to face, as reflections in the still water”
(409). Finally, after meticulous thought, the reader through Todd pauses to inspect her progress:
“The treadmill creaked again, and registered the notch of another empty revolution. Now Todd
shook himself and raised his eyes to see how far he had come” (410). The distance surveyed is
profound. And suddenly a ghostly teleology emerges beneath the preceding romance:

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The thing came, like a predestined growth, from the soil of necessity. “Joint knit to joint
expands the full formed fate.” As if, indeed, some ghostly counsellor leaned to him, from
which his human, his conventional selves recoiled, shuddering, seemed to his spirit a
thing designed, not cruelly, by the Gods themselves. (405)
Enlightened, Todd, and a host of other characters who have suffered through Yuki’s tale, huddle
together to find solace in their community. Removed from his usual machismo, the senator
admits: “I’d really like - if you don’t mind, my dears, - to turn woman and have one good cry”
(412). They absorb the shadow of themselves, the “feminine” aspects projected upon Yuki, and
find safety inside of their collective. Each of McCall’s Japan-themed novels close with a
domestic reconciliation in which the Romantic can co-exist with the pragmatist. Her proposed
escape from the impasse between Fenollosa’s positivism and Hearn’s Romanticism (or, more
precisely, the ambivalence between the approaches their work shares) comes in revealing the
mutual interdependence of one approach upon the other. Not merely for the sake of crude
synthesis but by retaining “perfection apart,” the family unit offers McCall a possible alternative
to the corrosive dichotomies of early Japanology.
Dissatisfaction and The Dragon Painter
At this critical juncture, it is germane to discuss briefly McCall’s most well-known work,
The Dragon Painter (1906). Upon reading the conclusions to her novels, one might critique
McCall’s Hegelian narratives as many critique Hegel’s philosophical system: the synthesis is too
neat and all-encompassing. Is McCall guilty of perpetrating “bad metaphysics,” the
unsophisticated simplification of Hegel’s system into thesis/antithesis/synthesis? I would argue,
in contrast, McCall has a solid grasp of Hegelian thought, seemingly stronger than her husband’s.

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First, as we have seen, she retains “perfection apart,” a balance of the universal and the particular
that will not permit easy hybridization. Second, The Dragon Painter enforces a key point one
might gloss over in reading the less evocative conclusions to Truth Dexter or The Breath of the
Gods: there is no conceivable “end,” only perpetually deferred satisfaction, Sakai’s “endless recentering.” In The Dragon Painter, McCall conceives of a satisfying synthesis of “East/West”
and “male/female” in order to then refuse such naïve closure.
The novel follows a triad of main characters, including Kano, a former renowned artist
who is desperately seeking a male heir, Tatsu, a wild and impetuous youth living in the
mountains of Japan and flinging his paintings to the wind, and Ume, Kano’s beautiful and
talented daughter who rarely leaves the household. Tatsu’s one goal in life is to find his beloved
Dragon Maiden; her image appears hidden in each of his paintings, traced into rocky cliffs and
tranquil ponds. Finding in Tatsu tremendous potential, Kano attempts to seduce him into
becoming his surrogate son, even going so far as to entice him with his daughter’s hand (she
happens to look exactly like the Dragon Maiden). Once married, Tatsu loses interest in art,
electing to enjoy instead the physical pleasures of marriage. However, in having found his muse,
the mountain man grows lethargic and fails to produce anything. Ume, distraught by this
development, feigns death to persuade her husband to create inspired art once again. The novel
closes with a return to contentment – and a child on the way.
Tatsu stands in for the “West,” longing for an abstract “East” while Ume, an abstraction
throughout, offers an amalgamation of stereotypes directed towards “Japan,” encompassing
“femininity,” dragon lore, superstition, and Nature. Upon joining with Ume, the dialectical
narrative progresses and he “drew his first conscious outline of the woman soon to be his wife”
(McCall 2010, 126). In other words, consciousness moves through Hegel’s aesthetic phases,
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from the symbolic, a tradition presumed to align with the “East,” to the image of humanity
reflecting back upon itself (for Hegel, the arrival of a Western trajectory in Greece). Tatsu’s
“progress” once more follows detailed Hegelian schematics. Nevertheless, when “East/West,”
“man/woman” meet, and form an ill-conceived union – one devised for Kano’s personal profit –
the result is far from satisfactory. Instead, what emerges is yet another abstraction. Tatsu informs
his wife: “There is no beauty now but in you! You are the sacred mirror which reflects for me all
loveliness” (169). This “sacred mirror” manifests in the work of McCall’s husband – universals
without particulars, an all-embracing “West” which has no further need of a symbolic “East.”
Satisfaction for Tatsu (“Life could give him no more!”) removes any remaining desire, and thus
he is no longer inspired (160).
Following Ume’s faked suicide (the reader is not let in on this secret and so follows Tatsu
through his transformation), Tatsu gradually comes to appreciate his inter-dependence on his
fellow human beings. He becomes aware his ideals can only give way to further abstraction:
“But I want her… not only her aerial spirit! I want her smile, - her little hands to touch me, the
golden echo of her laughter, - I want my wife, I say!” (196). He re-situates himself in the
material realm of particulars: “Of late he had begun to read, with deep interest, the various essays
on art, gathered in Kano’s small, choice library” (229). Months – and pages – pass. McCall, at
her most mechanical, thoroughly labors to shift Tatsu through Hegelian stages, struggling against
a tendency to reify his position: “No, his present condition had at least the negative value of
absolute void. From nothing, nothing could be taken; and to it, nothing be supplied!” (247).
Tatsu slowly unfolds into a more well-rounded individual, one balancing the fanciful and the
pragmatic, until he at last reunites with his “real” wife.

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The crux of The Dragon Painter relies upon a newfound appreciation for dissatisfaction.
While Kano and Tatsu as artists must seek to transcend their mortality, they must also apprehend
it is this very limitation compelling them to develop as individuals. McCall suggests that without
a “mystical East,” or a “fantastic female,” beyond their grasp, they would lose their purpose.
While it is true the novel ends with the promise of an impending birth, what some might view as
a “synthesis,” in fact the baby is yet to be born; the reader, like Tatsu, has no choice but to wait
for the next dialectical shift: “Anything might happen, or nothing!” (254). The Dragon Painter
therefore reveals a human propensity for continual self-abstraction, the desire to find satisfying
enclosure by uniting the halves of the Self and the imagined world. Yet, concurrently, McCall’s
Hegelian twist is crucial to understanding this novel, and to comprehending her work in general.
Echoing the Freudian fort-da game, what truly satiates is not finding the muse engulfing the Far
East, but watching it disappear in order to pursue it once again.

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The novel draws to a close

with the reader recognizing that they too must watch this artifact, fashioned from an imaginary
Japan, fade away in order to move forward productively: “Unless we have eternity to spare,
nodding beside (Kano) on the mats, we must bow, murmuring, ‘Sayo-nara’!” (262). Lukács
appreciates this attribute of the novel as a literary form due to a self-correction occurring “over
and over again,” an intermingling of “freedom and fetters.” This revelation sheds light on the
preoccupation of authors considering the archipelago, including Hearn and Fenollosa, who
lament a “vanishing Japan” but, in so doing, achieve their finest artistic expression. McCall, ever
engaged with the art-making process, appreciates Sakai’s perpetual “re-centering” at the core of
Japonisme and thus affords one an opportunity to take up renewed interest in the negation
running throughout the phenomenon.

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The Sacrificial Wife
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Still, in McCall’s alternative one cannot overlook the problems in her use of “Japan” to
resolve the question of gender. Her synthesis of styles ultimately cannot supersede the
confounding conclusions of her male contemporaries. The dialectical system she evokes, reliant
upon “feminine mystique” and “maternalism,” relies upon predictable interpretive paradigms
adapted from male-centered schools of thought. Specifically, McCall valorizes the selfdestructive Eastern female, who accepts martyrdom, a very un-Hegelian concept, to preserve
Western civilization; she simultaneously champions Western women who enthusiastically take
up the mantle of maternal devotion. In either case, at the head of the family is a sacrificial
woman, willfully allowing Otherness to be cast upon her for the “greater good.” Truth,
embracing the immaterial elements of Orchid, returns to her roots to emerge once again a symbol
of purity; Yuki firmly tells Senator Todd that it is her “choice” to become the “ghost” for the two
men; Ume writes in her suicide note of alleviating her husband’s burdensome self-division: “By
sacrifice of joy and life I now attempt to expiate it” (McCall 2010, 184). These female
protagonists know all along that playing the phantom will force men, be they imperial
conquerors or love-struck artists, to come to terms with the restlessness haunting them. Her
iconography of the “feminine,” meant to be poetically subversive or devotionally uplifting,
exemplifies the stereotypes persistently employed to categorize “Japan” and “femininity” in the
Western imagination. Though it was unorthodox at the time to put these stereotypes in
conversation with one another, proximity does not overcome the unsatisfying limitations of each.
Rather than effective revision, McCall can be read ultimately as guilty of re-capitulating at times
the quagmire of gender politics from that era.
McCall’s texts, albeit frustrating in their lack of satisfying answers, were nevertheless
important contributions to the intersection between idealism, gender, and the role of Japanese
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aesthetics in America at the turn of the century. In ways more sophisticated than her friend Hearn
and husband Fenollosa, McCall imagined a method with which the “West” could mature past an
imperialist consciousness and turn back on itself, focused on “mending its own house.” As Hegel
writes in the preface to the Phenomenology: “what is thus separated, and in a sense is unreal, is
itself an essential moment; for just because the concrete moment is self-divided, and turns into
unreality, it is something self-moving, self-active” (Hegel, 23). The most unique and enduring
aspect of McCall’s fiction remains its introspection on the “self-active” imagining of “Japan”
and what that means for constructions of “femininity” in American discourse. Her work engages
with the latent complexity that existed, and continues to exist today, between gender
constructions and fantasies of the Far East.

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“A Soft Shock to the Ego”
Japonisme and the Female Gothic

The first quarter of the twentieth century saw tremendous changes taking place in
Western concepts of gender as well as in the international position of the nation. These shifts in
cultural perception were not mutually exclusive; in particular, “Japan” as an imaginary space was
regularly constituted in gendered terms. This constructed locale, constituted by consumer
products ranging from home décor to popular fiction, served as a canvas for multiple female
artists, including Sidney McCall (as we investigated in the previous chapter). This fad revealed a
set of widely known tropes with which individuals could articulate social anxieties. As Mari
Yoshihara demonstrates, Western female authors made use of Japonisme in ways frequently
innovative and unsettling. These authors explored the borderlands of gender identity, probing the
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limits of what constitutes “femininity” from the mystical excesses of what constitutes “Japan.”
Various scholars recognize the convergence of gender and the “Japan Idea.” Christine

Guth, for one, notes that an appreciation of Japanese curios has been historically aligned with an
“identification with the feminine” (Guth, 94); Kristin L. Hoganson studies the historical
ambivalence of this collision, commenting that “cosmopolitan domesticity illuminates something
far more complex than the self-assertion generally thought to characterize the United States in
this period” (Hoganson, 55). This chapter will attempt to develop these claims. One locates in
many of the works of female novelists incorporating popular “japanning” techniques a depth that
requires far greater analysis in order to understand how twentieth century concepts of
“femininity” and Western depictions of the archipelago were forged from similar fires.

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Ian Littlewood’s The Idea of Japan extrapolates from these constructs, stating “the image
of the Japanese woman is the image of Japan itself” (Littlewood, 142). While this is may be
correct in particular texts, Littlewood’s assertion overlooks the fear and power commonly
associated with “Japanese femininity.” He asserts, “(A construct of the Japanese woman) offers
the chance to purchase it, to dominate it, to penetrate its mysteries… and its secret knowledge”
(143). This analysis, not uncommon in critical commentary on the subject, misses a range of
textual alternatives. A symbolic “feminine Japan” is relegated to the status of “product” and
divorced from the raw potentiality of a “secret knowledge”; the argument presupposes the
consumer to be “masculine” in orientation – the “penetrating” gaze, the “dominant” position –
and therefore that the exotic core of “femininity” (as well as “Japan”) is primarily the purchase
of a Western, male audience. In truth, many of the writers creating the images were Western
women and, while this certainly did not preclude Orientalism, it did allow avenues for selfreflection and a confrontation with narrowly-confined sites of cultural and gendered identity.
The works I consider in this chapter move away from Madame Butterfly and its platonic
celebration of an “eternal feminine” emanating from the Far East, to be bought and contained.
The resultant texts are therefore dissimilar from John Luther Long’s familiar tale of the confident,
dismissive Lieutenant Pinkerton and the fragile, self-destructive Japanese flower, Cho-Cho-San.
In contrast, they include disruptive glimpses of what has previously been repressed by Western
patriarchy. Female consumers, the dominant purchaser of curios from Japan in the early decades
of the century, attain a “penetrating” gaze and confront “secret knowledge” associated with
notions of the “feminine mystique.”

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As theorist Georges Bataille observes, “Human life cannot

in any way be limited to the closed systems assigned to it by reasonable conceptions” (Bataille,
128). Consequently, characters in these works are repeatedly rendered in a state of awe,
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bewitched by power coded as “Japanese femininity,” granting the ability to transgress the
barriers established by Western hegemony.
“The Japan Idea” thus provides a particularly fertile fictional ground for exploring
intersecting constructions of gender and cultural difference in the Gothic genre. In one account,
the country is an object of anxiety for its rapid modernization and for defeating “giants” such as
Russia and China, the representation of which grants “Japan” a certain “masculine” aura (a
source, undoubtedly, of trepidation among certain Western subjects). In other accounts, the
country is masked by an ephemeral aestheticism, an effeminate propensity for tea ceremonies,
flower decorations, and exotic geisha (again, a source for anxiety among particular “industrial”
citizens). It is perhaps not surprising figures as diverse as the “hyper-masculine” politician
Theodore Roosevelt and the “hyper-feminine” Hearn were drawn towards the archipelago at the
very same moment. Both sides embed representations of the archipelago with “weird powers,”
evoking distinct sensations of fear from their audience.
An example of these competing anxieties appears in Wallace Irwin’s Seed of the Sun
(1922). On one hand, the majority of the text focuses on a masculinized “yellow peril,” seen
violating the California landscape as well as the white women within it. On the other hand, the
reader encounters the eerie figure of Mrs. Shimba, wife of a Japanese immigrant who has
divorced her and forsaken her in favor of Japanese modernization. The protagonist Anna, an
innocent woman who has recently taken on the “man’s work” of operating a farm, is stunned
upon finding the old woman’s gruesome body dangling in the rafters of the barn. Mrs. Shimba
thereafter lurks in the pages of the text, her purpose never explained or finalized: “Somewhere
from the moonlit outer world there came again that wail. Night after night (Anna) had heard it,
floating thin and icy clear above her orchards… long-sustained and terrible… she stood at her
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bedroom door palsied with superstitious terror of the soil, sweet and commonplace by day,
giving up ghosts by night” (Irwin, 124). Mrs. Shimba’s purpose, in terms of plot and form, is
sheer excess. Anna’s competing objects of dread, the shadowy male Japanese who seek to spread
their metaphorical seed as well as the intangible phantasm of Japanese tradition embodied in Mrs.
Shimba’s howling, reflects oppositional fears surrounding her. She is psychologically pulled
between her “feminine” and newly-minted “masculine” characteristics. This ambivalence
provides the writers in question with a frame in which to investigate power structures entrenched
within a haunted Self.
To articulate the frame, the authors this chapter will consider derive formulaic patterns
from the Female Gothic, defined by Jeffrey Weinstock as “that category of literature in which
female authors utilize Gothic themes in order to address specifically female concerns”
(Weinstock, 1). It interrogates intersections between productions of “femininity” and literary
Gothic conventions, usually, though not exclusively, undergone by female authors.

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The term

itself is malleable and regularly re-worked; indeed, it is to this malleability the chapter hopes to
speak. Early twentieth century fiction was inundated with female authors employing the
trappings of the Gothic, making it one of the most popular touchstones in the era. While filling
Western living rooms with Japanese curios helped to construct a more cosmopolitan or
empowered self-image for many of these women, tropes from the Female Gothic simultaneously
fulfilled a similar desire to view the “foreignness” repressed within their domestic roles. Ellen
Moers, one of the earliest theorists of the Female Gothic, argues “to give visual form to the fear
of self, to hold anxiety up to the Gothic mirror of the imagination, may well be more common in
the writings of women than of men… nothing separates female experience from male experience
more sharply, and more early in life, than the compulsion to visualize the self” (Moers, 107).
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This urge, typically attributed to female writers according to Moers, projects abjection imagined
within oneself onto one’s surroundings in order to reify a socially-defined “abnormality.”
Converging familiar tropes concerning “Japan” with equally familiar tropes from the
Female Gothic, these innovative female authors seized politically and financially expedient
refrains. Weinstock continues, “Female authors, in choosing to employ supernatural conventions
to express themselves, were responding to cultural trends and positioning themselves in the
literary marketplace” (Weinstock, 17). Concomitantly, elements of Japonisme add an auxiliary
element of the exotic to draw in a larger audience for works employing themes of the sensational
Female Gothic. Yet, resisting such wholesale borrowings, these authors interweave fragments
from each trend.
The amalgamation of these narrative devices remains ignored in previous scholarship.
Each of the authors in question has been more or less relegated to the dustbins of popular fiction,
cast aside as mere Orientalist curios from an eccentric time period. Re-analyzing these texts is
essential not only for scholars who study U.S. representations of “Asia” more broadly, but also
for those who interrogate gender construction and cultural difference within Gothic literature.
This chapter will focus on three authors, Dorothy Wayman, Mary Crawford Fraser, and
Winnifred Eaton, writers from the first quarter of the century who capitalize on the popularity of
the Female Gothic while shaping the ways in which American culture has predominantly
portrayed “Japan” and the “feminine” as an object of anxiety ever since. I begin by examining
the traditional Gothic theme of a maiden kidnapped by a monster, developed by Wayman and
Fraser; dark castles in these tales become scenes of border-crossing articulated through
problematic visions of gendered and cultural difference. This model, despite its novelty, in many
ways re-enforces an already-existent dichotomy between Self and Other. I then turn to the
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border-crossings in Eaton’s narratives. Departing in multiple ways from Wayman and Fraser,
Eaton transforms external threats of violation into an internal investigation of a tormented Self.
The abject hybridization of the “feminine” and “Japan” therefore festers in the psychology of her
fictional subjects, who slowly become “foreigners to themselves” in cosmopolitan Gothic
fashion.
Wayman and Fraser: Love and Death in Japanese Castles
“Japan,” an oft-imagined locale in American popular culture, seems at first an unlikely
setting for transposing the ominous abbeys of the British Gothicists. However, in texts written by
two particular authors, Dorothy Wayman and Mrs. Hugh Fraser, the archipelago transforms into
a landscape filled with shadowy ruins, attended to by brooding masters. These literary elements
of necessity undergo a transformation: the castle, once coded as “masculine” in Gothic texts, as
well as the maiden/monster dichotomy embedded within this formula, becomes problematized,
suggesting another layer of complexity in once familiar paradoxes.
Dorothy Wayman, publishing under the pseudonym of Theodate Geoffrey, describes
“Japan” by borrowing familiar archetypes. Wayman’s work suffers from stilted prose not
uncommon in popular fiction of the era; upon discovering a secret Japanese base, one character
blurts: “If it isn’t an airplane base, I’m a ding-toed wallaby” (Wayman 1926a, 205). The
narratives also rely upon hackneyed plot devices and uneven character development. When one
looks past these stylistic blemishes, Wayman’s texts illuminate how she embraced the thrilling
aspects of an imaginary “Japan” to question the “proper” role of women in the twentieth century.
Wayman resided in Japan for a short time with her husband, a U.S. government official.
The experience prompted her, as many before and after, to put her pen to paper and compose a
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travelogue of her life in this “weird” Eastern locale. An Immigrant in Japan (1926), a
supposedly authentic account of the country and its customs, repeatedly returns to Gothicism to
propel the narrative forward. In highlighting this tendency, one immediately recognizes the
persistent influence of Hearn, the self-proclaimed “anti-modern nomad” who documented Japan
with a deep affinity for the strange and bizarre (see chapter 1). Hearn lingers in all of these texts
in traces, sculpting the discourse as well as being overtly referenced on several occasions.

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The

travelogue echoes a Hearnian style, portraying unsettling encounters with supernatural forces
through excessive descriptions – the narrator watches a woman and her child buried alive during
an earthquake, an event she deems “too horrible to contemplate”; she visits Japanese graveyards
in which “a faint rustle, as of a timid ghost stirring, made me turn”; and she experiences eerie
archipelago in ways that overtly reverberate Hearn’s earlier visions: “Everyone must have felt at
some time or other that fleeting emotion – ghostly thrill, Lafcadio Hearn calls it – which comes
at the first meeting with some person like a soft shock to the ego” (Wayman 1926b, 86; 142; 149,
emphasis mine). “Japan” manifests as a space of romanticized Otherness through Wayman’s
employment of primal, immediate, and less mediated sensations.
Wayman’s borrowings from Gothicism are even more pointed in her novel Powdered
Ashes (1926). She closely follows a formula in existence since Horace Walpole’s seminal Castle
of Otranto: a beautiful young woman, Paula Payne, is pursued by a sexualized madman, the
villainous Ichijiro Tsurumi, deep into the dark crevices of an ancient, decaying castle. Paula,
with her hapless but lovable husband Bob, takes a trip to Japan to conduct business. On the way,
she meets the magnetic Ichijiro upon his returning from years of studying in the West. She is
attracted and repulsed by this powerful young figure. Eventually, as “he was mad with desire to

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possess Paula Payne,” Ichijiro kidnaps her and holds her hostage in his family’s decrepit fortress
(Wayman 1926a, 120).
Beyond the trappings of predictable plot devices, what is perhaps most interesting in
Wayman’s narrative is the bond between victim Paula and villain Ichijiro. Gothic literature
repeatedly blurs gender constructions through the connection between monster and maiden. A
classic example of this phenomenon appears with Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), in which Mina
is compelled towards Dracula while simultaneously feeling a profound disgust. Dracula himself,
as many scholars note, exists in the boundary between socially sanctioned descriptions of
“masculinity” and “femininity”; this confirms a sadomasochistic edge often present in Gothic
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novels.

Powdered Ashes reframes this concept to encompass the “East/West” relationship. On

one side, there is Paula, who is enticed by the liberation of becoming a “modern girl,” while also
desiring the domination of a strong male figure. Paula, identified as “the blue-eyed one with hair
cut like a boy,” determines to seize an opportunity in Japan to assert her power as an adult
woman. Gertrude, the matriarchal guardian of the group, warns: “Modern girls are inclined to be
restless” (25). Yet from her first embrace in Ichijiro’s “coiling steel cables” for arms Paula also
feels a “secret thrill in the dominance of Ichijiro” (69). There is a compulsion towards the act of
possessing and the act of being possessed within the novel, a dual impulse haphazardly applied
to the narrative of “Japan,” a nation widely portrayed in Western discourse of the time period as
entering into the business of empire-building.
Ichijiro, the symbol of “New Japan,” conveys a liminal identity, lunging into madness
with an urge to acquire everything he sees, including Paula. Concurrently, he retains a bourgeois
sentimentality marking him as already integrated into older notions of the “feminine.” He has “a
hand unthinkable for a man and yet, strangely, with nothing effeminate about it” (4). “Japan,” as
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noted, occupied a similarly ambivalent space in the popular imagination, linked to both
“masculine” militarism and “feminized” leisure. Ichijiro thus supersedes the boundaries
prescribed upon him as a stereotypical Japanese character. He initially “talked of art, of music, of
the beauties of nature” in ways that moved Paula; his uncle, a toad-like gentry seemingly
modeled after Wilkie Collins’ diabolical Count Fosco, compares Ichijiro to “a butterfly
intoxicated with the scent of wisteria” (10; 117). His unnatural “smoothness” makes Paula yearn
for him and then finally spurn his advances. This sparks Ichijiro’s transformation into absolute
monstrosity:
Thrusting Paula into a corner where she shrank back, pallid, horror-stricken, Ichijiro drew
out the wooden shutters before the balcony, bolting them with a secret wooden lock, and
glowered at the girl in the light of the electric bulb which burned night and day into the
room. (233)
Copious emotions are baldly exposed in the confrontational scene through the pure terror of the
victim and the raw animal hunger of the villain.
In this topography of excess, Ichijiro and Paula intersect as monster and maiden, each
yearning for something beyond the lot designated for them in the modern world. Ichijiro, who
believes possessing Paula will allow “Japan” to become a “great nation,” grows obsessed with
“femininity,” the repressed side of his cultural identity. His “urging of a strange weapon, his talk
of utilizing the new power of womanhood” almost causes the natural state of things to collapse
and the advance of “Japan” to come to a screeching halt (300). Critic Marianne Noble describes
the Female Gothic as “a transgressive flirtation with extreme, irrational states of being, again
directing an implicit critique toward the bland states sanctioned by previous norms of

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femininity” (Noble, 174). Gendered and cultural states of normativity are transgressed in
Wayman’s work, allowing the reader – alongside Paula and Ichijiro – to flirt with brief ecstasies
of emotion against the regimented calculations of rationality upheld within modernity.
By the close of the novel, the two patriarchs return to restore order following the
violations of the social order committed by their children Paula and Ichijiro, giving the novel a
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conservative streak persistent in popular Gothic fictions.

John Turner, Paula’s father, scolds

her: “If you’d tended to your knitting this Tsurumi devil wouldn’t have had a chance for his
hellish schemes” (Wayman 1926a, 275). Ichijiro’s uncle, meanwhile, will not be outdone and
ritualistically beheads his comatose nephew, who has pursued excess to its logical conclusion.
The ending of the novel celebrates an American brand of tough-minded, unemotional
industrialism captured in the rugged wisdom of the patriarchy, reminding one of Alice Mabel
Bacon’s earlier adaptations of Japanese folklore, In the Land of the Gods: Some Stories of Japan
(1905), discussed in the introduction. The sensational venture into the borderland is sealed off,
once again, by prescriptions of Puritanical fortitude.
Still, what remains for Wayman’s readers is an imagined “Japan” to make violations of
the so-called “natural order” possible. Walpole’s archetypal castle, re-invented in Powdered
Ashes, converts into a physical manifestation of the twin impulses within its characters and
within the potential reader as well. The castle sits
Surrounded by a moat… above the wall appeared the feathery white drifts of cherry
blossoms… a gilded dolphin shone on the canonical peak of the stone tower… cherry
trees grew here and there in the smooth-swept gravel and a clipped privet hedge curtained
the stone of the wall. (170-1)

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The setting stands essential to the narrative, as it provides an already-enclosed fantastic space,
complete with people and customs, to re-articulate familiar literary devices. The bleak castle,
once the epitome of Western male authority in Gothic literature, is itself modified in
cosmopolitan fashion, “feminized” and “Japanized,” curtained by beautiful flowers and topped
with a gilded-dolphin. The deep connection between Paula and Ichijiro, as mutual monster and
maiden, regains the potential for eruption in this mystical place across the Pacific, where
unbridled impulses emerge to evoke new sensations from a very old plot.
***********************************
Mary Crawford Fraser, publishing under the married title of Mrs. Hugh Fraser,
capitalized on comparable themes to those of Wayman. Fraser was a cosmopolitan woman par
excellence, gaining lengthy exposure to many global cultures during her lifetime, including
prominently Italy and Japan, where she lived for several years as the wife of a diplomat. She was
a member of a family with clear interest in macabre matters: her brother F. Marion Crawford
held renown as a writer of ghost stories, and her sister Anne Von Rabe, a Baroness, wrote an
early vampiress novella, A Mystery of the Campagna (1886). Mary herself contributed to a
volume of eerie stories composed by her siblings, Uncanny Tales (1911), with a were-wolf
narrative entitled “A Werewolf of the Campagna.”

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As a writer, her fiction handles supernatural

images of “Japan” with greater involvedness than Wayman, who is certainly the more
commercial writer of the two. Her explorations of an imaginary archipelago go even further in
articulating an “un-representable” outside the fringes of Western patriarchy by revising formal
devices borrowed from Gothicism.

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Fraser’s novel The Stolen Emperor (1904) provides a variation on the formula one finds
in Powdered Ashes. The novel trails the young and beautiful Empress Jito as she is tormented by
not one but two unseemly authority figures: the dying Emperor, who proclaims himself to be
“already dead,” and the daimyo Kashima, who wants to depose the Emperor and return “Japan”
to a feudal state. The familiar narrative involves Kashima, mad with lust for power and for Jito,
kidnapping the Empress and her son, the future Emperor, and carrying them to his ghastly castle.
Over the course of the novel, Fraser positions Jito as the protagonist who faces appalling
manifestations of her unsettled relationship to new-found power. The Stolen Emperor situates
“Japan” and “femininity” at identical crossroads, torn between old (and vanishing) fictions and
uncontrollable modern ones. These two sides are represented as equally extreme, giving the
novel a sense of tragic impasse. “Old Japan,” embodied by the dying Emperor who is coded as
“feminine,” hidden away in a room where “the air was dusky with perpetual gloom… the place
was a casket – for a lusterless gem. The frail stopping figure and womanish hands told their own
story of gilded confinement, of morbid luxury” (Fraser, 25 emphasis mine). Jito reacts to this part
of her country (and herself): “Could the gods not have made me the ruler man, and him the
subject woman? Why dress weakness in armour and strength in painted robes?” (30). A gilded
past oppresses her. Conversely, meetings with Kashima, an active agent for change who is full of
blind desire for an empowered future, promise a “New Japan” defined by the relentless drive to
expand, flaunting “hyper-masculine” traits, lingering within Jito as well at several moments in
the narrative. This compulsion, as in Wayman’s text, rapidly devolves into a terrifying stand-off:
“The light was failing now, and (Kashima) stood for a moment, a dark, threatening figure in the
gloom, seeking for Jito… he saw her, where she stood, a white still figure in the dusk” (221). Jito

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searches frantically for an escape from this land of unspeakable dread as well as her personal and nationalized - confinement.
The novel represents the two sides of Jito, “New Japan” and “Old Japan,” as synonymous
with Death, forcing Jito and the reader to experience the limits of modernity – at least, as it has
been chartered in their sensorium. Bataille examines such “perverse” drives in Literature and
Evil, focusing on figures who probe into “the climax of the forbidden, a delight that is familiar
and elemental and yet closed to modern thought” (Bataille 1997, 186). The Stolen Emperor
cleaves into two locales, each consumed by analogous sensations of horror and the forbidden
exteriors of modern thought. First, the Emperor’s casket is traversed by Jito, who wanders
frightened “in the haunted Kyoto palace, where so many hearts had broken, so many splendid
shadows had passed away weeping in the gorgeous gloom… it was dark in the deserted
chambers, and through the darkness came strange scents of musk and sandal wood, ghosts of
perfumes hanging in the unbreathed air” (Fraser, 34-41). From this womb-like prison, Jito moves
to Omi Castle, an ominous pile of rock haunted by tales of a previous Emperor who was starved
within its walls. Local residents hear cries “bitter and sharp… seen a wild white face behind the
bars of that window in the lower rock, had seen two skeleton hands stretched out in frantic
entreaty” (57). The castle reminds one of the Marquis de Sade’s “unspeakable torments.” As Jito
is led through the narrow corridors, she hears “wild shrieks of terror from a hundred throats rent
the silence of the night… the rooms were full of screaming women… through a mass of human
beings, fighting, screaming, groaning, dying as they passed” (97-98). She shifts from a nostalgic
trepidation emanating from “Old Japan,” with its ominous ancestors roaming the grounds, into
the contemporary terror of a hedonistic “New Japan,” with unruly potential lurking beneath the
once-gilded surface of a castle “where some red ray struck the rock it looked wet with blood”
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(115). The haunted prisons open for Jito sensations long denied, sensations outside of her
quotidian experience of “proper femininity” and Japanese custom. Kashima, echoing Bataille’s
claims, interrogates the nightmare he embodies: “What was the difference between love and
hate? As he held the woman’s beautiful hands and looked into her face he felt that the joy of
killing her would almost surpass the joy of possessing her… what next? What next in this night
of terror?” (259). Sadomasochistic chaos reveals for Jito self-abjection as well as selfempowerment, made possible through convenient images of Japan’s aestheticized history.
Although both Wayman and Fraser probe the definitions of “femininity” and the
“East/West” binary via the Gothic medium, critiques of their attempts might echo critiques of
early Gothic literature. The reader preserves a position safely detached from the proceedings and
so the divisions of Self and Other are manipulated without serious consequence. These works
remain, for the most part, a playful escape rather than a genuine questioning of the Self. In
contrast, the writer I turn to in the following section utilizes components of the Gothic genre to
deconstruct her identity as well as superficial distinctions erected between the “East” and
“West.” Winnifed Eaton’s psychological moments of horror attempt to tear apart generic
playfulness in favor of eerie passages to promote genuine self-doubt for her predominantly
Western audience.
Winnifred Eaton: Excesses of a Divided Self
While Wayman and Fraser look to more formulaic expressions of the Gothic to render
“Japan” as well as the “feminine” as sites of abjection, Eaton relies instead on the Gothicism of
her contemporaries, including Henry James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Her representations of
the archipelago and gendered crises do not rely on aged artifacts, such as decrepit castles; instead,

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she internalizes the uncertainty Wayman and Fraser manifest externally within the fractured
psyche of her characters. Eaton’s merging of the Female Gothic and Japonisme demonstrates a
modern Self plagued by the multitudes within, including murky distinctions between
“East/West,” “male/female.”
Eaton spent the majority of her career publishing under the Japanese-sounding
pseudonym Onoto Watanna. Having undergone a sort of re-discovery in the 1970s, her fiction is
challenging and complex at a level scholars have yet to appreciate fully. Her accomplishments
include numerous successful novels and stints as a major Hollywood screenwriter, working
directly under such icons as Carl Laemmle. As a storyteller, she received glowing praise from no
less than the pragmatic dean of American letters, William Dean Howells, who ironically
appreciated the “realism” of her prose. She also garnered public attention through her
engagement in publicized legal battles with two of the forefathers depicting a “feminized Japan,”
John Luther Long and David Belasco. Despite the fact she was not Japanese, nor did she ever set
foot on Japanese soil, fueled by a Japanese persona Eaton’s fiction maintained a certain aura of
authenticity throughout her lifetime, revealing in her what biographer Jean Lee Cole calls a
“shallow desire for success” (Cole, 2). Eaton’s granddaughter and biographer Dianna Birchall
admits Eaton “experimented and postured her way through life,” while even Eaton recognizes
her “success was founded upon a cheap and popular device” (Birchall, xvi; 83). Nevertheless,
beneath the exploitative qualities of the ruse, Eaton poses important questions about identity,
based upon her identification as a “half-caste” of European and Chinese heritage. She adopts
Gothic themes, such as the literary double, to reflect divided notions of an Asian-American and
female Self.

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And though her works “were first and foremost, romances and melodramas,

intended to entertain, to enchant, sometimes to shock,” Eaton is rarely content with the merely
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formulaic, electing to capitalize instead on stylized moments of “shock” in order to expose the
raw potential she feels emerging from her pen.

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She gives the reader terrifying glimpses of a

truly liberated subject, a force she found buried inside of the hackneyed discourses of Japonisme
as well as constructions of “femininity” (xix, emphasis mine). She writes in her fauxautobiography, “There was a pain in my heart, but it was an ecstatic one, and even as I cried
softly, soundlessly, something within me sang a song that seemed immortal” (Watanna 1997,
103).
The Heart of Hyacinth (1903), prescient of the texts already discussed, links “Japan” and
“femininity” in direct relation to the surpluses of Death, portraying a divided female torn
between her Asian and American alliance, simultaneously posited as “pre-modern” versus
“modern.” The Heart of Hyacinth opens with the agonizingly slow death of young Hyacinth’s
mother, an American woman. She arrives in the village, having been driven out of her wits by
Western social mores, informing the family, “Everyone stared at me; it must have been because I
had gone mad, you know, quite mad. All women do” (Watanna 2000, 25). After establishing the
plight of a female made “hysterical” by a liminal position between Western and Eastern cultures,
as well as her station as both mother and independent woman, Eaton describes the character’s
vivid decomposition. When the innocent boy Koma ventures into the room of the dying woman,
Her white face seemed to have shrunken through the night – so white and still it was that
she seemed scarcely to breath… she seemed a spirit of the lingering twilight… but soft as
was (Koma’s) touch it acted like an electric shock upon the woman. She started and
quivered, as her heavy lids lifted. At the little face bending above her she stared. A
strange expression came into her face. (27 – 32)

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The American mother, for the reader and Koma, shapes the remainder of the narrative. Cast in a
mysterious shroud, she quite literally disintegrates before the reader’s eyes, trapped in a struggle
between life and Death. “Western” and “female” are subsequently rendered synonymous with
decay and self-abjection. Moers, whose interpretation of the Female Gothic readily lends itself to
a reading of Eaton’s doubles, discovers “self-hatred” in this type of projection, signifying the
“feminine” as a grotesque “living corpse” (Moers, 110). Hyacinth’s internal struggle with her
“half-caste” identity erupts in unnerving passages of female putrefaction.
Hyacinth identifies with the grotesque in complicated ways. At certain times, she is
horrified; elsewhere, she finds it comforting, even revelatory. Early in the novel, she recognizes
in her reflection the utter ghastliness of her mother’s living corpse. Confronting her reflection,
she recoils: “An uncanny fear took possession of the little girl. Suddenly she raised her hand,
knocking the glass from that of Koma… Hyacinth was frightened – yes, actually afraid of the
mirror” (75). However, at other moments, she seems attached to her darker side, a side
previously repressed by Japanese punctilios. When Koma tries to tell her a comforting fairytale,
Hyacinth protests:
“I don’t like those kind of stories. Like better stories about ghosts and - ”
“Oh, you always get afraid of such stories, screaming like sea gull.”
“Yes, but all same, I like to do that – like to hear such stories – like also to get frightened
and scream.” (41)
Hyacinth cannot resist enchantment with - and repulsion from - the abjection she imagines at her
core.

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This is further articulated in the final pages of the novel, in which she must flee from her

father’s attempts to reclaim her into a “proper” place in society. Her place of refuge,
appropriately drenched with Eaton’s Gothic sensibilities, is the family tombs.
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In Koma’s attempt to rescue Hyacinth from the tomb in which she hides, one locates the
essential difference between Eaton and writers such as John Luther Long. Koma, unlike the selfconfident Pinkerton of Madame Butterfly, is terrified by the “feminine” essence eluding
containment by Japanese and American authorities. Prior to meeting Hyacinth’s mother, Koma
wanders into the house with trepidation: “The house was in darkness. Suddenly a voice, a
piercing, shrill voice, rang out through the silent house. ‘The light, the light!’ it cried: ‘oh, it is
gone, gone!’ Koma clutched his mother’s hand with a sudden, tense fear” (16 – 17). This fear
foreshadows his pursuit of Hyacinth into the silent sepulcher:
Every inch of the ground within he examined, feeling about with his hands… fear urging
him forward… this was the great secret cave he himself had shown her… he dared not
look at them, lest he become dizzy with horror… something dark and still outstretched
upon the surface of the rock. He caught his breath, then covered his mouth with his hands
lest a cry escape him… her upturned face, with the moon rays upon it, was wondrously,
ethereally beautiful. Awed, reverential, Koma gazed. (199 – 201)
The male characters in Eaton’s fiction recurrently experience fear in the face of Japanese women.
They are rarely condescending, possessive, or self-assured. On the contrary, finding the
intersection of “Japan” and “femininity” to be a place of repulsion, the male characters are
shaken from any comfortable sense of control over their surroundings. Identification with these
frightened male characters permits Eaton’s traget female readers to gaze, as if from an external
perspective, and confront the abjection they have been led to suspect lurking within previously
anchored notions of “femininity.”

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Theorist Julia Kristeva, in The Power of Horror, ruminates upon the human potential
writers such as Eaton channel in their Gothic moments, illustrating positions which emerge
congruently with a grotesque “feminine,” “the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities
(subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so – double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal,
metamorphosed, altered, abject” (Kristeva 1982, 207). Eaton, concerned with her “half-caste”
role, in addition to the fictional and professional binaries she sanctions for herself, thrives upon
these dizzying spaces of overlap, where divisions between “East/West,” “female/male” dissolve
into genuine “shock.” Scholar Dominika Ferens comments, “Winnifred combined ‘romance’ and
‘Japan’ into a fictional sphere where almost anything could happen, in order to work out racial
and gender conflicts that she experienced in North America” (Ferens, 153). I believe it is in
Kristeva’s borderlands Eaton’s fictions achieves their most powerful affect.

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Themes of Death and vision are blended brilliantly in Eaton’s popular and ambitious
novel, The Japanese Nightingale (1901). Female characters are sources of tremendous anxiety in
the text, haunting the men who might elsewhere try to claim authority over them. The plot is
similar to a considerable number of narratives from this time period: Jack, the American official,
arrives in Japan only to fall in love with Yuki, a beautiful and “bewitching” geisha. The drama
centers on whether or not the two will be allowed to be together in the end. Yet the plot and style
diverge from the formula in important ways. Although the novel is often compared to, and
compiled alongside of, fiction such as Long’s Madame Butterfly, Eaton’s novel fundamentally
challenges romanticized visions of Japanese females.
For Eaton, female Japanese characters unsettle. Yuki initially emerges in a bizarre
setting: “The air was filled with the “bizarre, wholly fascinating music of the koto and samisen”
(Watanna 2002, 86). Eaton’s imaginary “Japan” bursts with “weird” sounds, those most primal
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of sensations, unfamiliar to Western ears. Accompanying the unnerving soundtrack, Yuki
emerges:
The girl did not rise at the sound of his voice, but crept nearer to him, her hair still
enshrouding her. It made him feel creepy… her face was incomplete… with that rich redblack hair enshrouding her, and the long, blue eyes looking at him mistily, she was an
eerie little creature that made him marvel. (92 – 93)
Unlike the exotic beauty of Long’s Cho-Cho-San, Yuki’s attractiveness befits the Female Gothic.
She jolts Jack and the reader by startling them out of complacency and offering emotions with
which to move outside “the norm.”
Female readers, through Yuki, gaze through a “half-caste” lens: they are simultaneously
limited as the object of Western vision and, at the same moment, empowered by their capacity to
look down at the cowering men before them. In multiple moments throughout the text, Eaton
draws attention to Yuki’s distinctly blue eyes - a familiar marker of Western identity - in order to
expose the uncertain position of the reader. The eyes petrifying Jack are both unfamiliar and
familiar. This is a comfortable encounter for neither Jack nor the readers, who lose a firm grasp
upon their position or point of identification within the narrative. “Japan,” in Eaton’s rendition,
overflows with witches, ghosts, and half-dead creatures, filling onlookers with the darkest of
terrors by granting, and then denying, the authority of their vision.
In these scenes, women who are deserted by American suitors are hardly demure or selfdestructive; rather, they are powerful and unwilling to vanish into the mist at the whims of male
perpetrators. “The bay was enchanted – yes, but haunted too… there had been many, many
witchmaids who had haunted the shores” (160). The distinction between “enchanted” and
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“haunted” marks perhaps the clearest distinction between authors such as Long from Eaton:
“enchanted” implies a contained spectacle, and agency, for the reader. “Haunted,” in contrast,
implies an unwanted return, a loss of power at the hands of irrepressible sentiments. Jack starts to
comprehend this distinction when he encounters Yuki’s mother, a victim of prior abuse at the
hands of a Western man:
The mother crept from the shrine with stealing step, her white face like a mask of death,
her small, frail hands outstretched… a consciousness of her eerie approach thrilling Jack
Bigelow… she had clothed herself in all the vestal garments of the dead… swaying and
tottering in all her ghastly attire. (153)
Jack, hardly “enchanted,” is rendered speechless, suddenly aware of the potency in the Far East
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as well as the opposite sex.

These “shocking” passages, Eaton’s texts insist, allow female readers the potential to
project a “feminine mystique” onto an uncanny Japanese body while retaining a sense of control
by aligning with male victims. Placed in painful proximity to Cho-Cho-San, male characters
must wait, fearful for their sanity, as Yuki abandons them. Taro, Yuki’s brother, upon
discovering her absence, goes into fits, unable to cope with the inversion. Jack waits by his
bedside as Taro loses touch with reality. “He was in the midst of a fever dream – a nightmare…
Jack saw the terrible gleam of two delirious eyes and stood magnetized. With lightning fury the
raving man had thrown aside the bedclothes, sprung from the bed” (150). Jack, correspondingly
tormented, loses more control with each passing hour. The home he had once shared with Yuki
turns into a space of apprehension, captured in his “shadowed room… he feared to stir, lest the
spell, ghostly and entrancing… might vanish into mistland… was there not behind it all some

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mysterious possibility of such a spirit?” (168). He walks, alone, through the somber chambers:
“‘The place is haunted!’ he said, and scarce knew his own hollow voice, which the echoes of the
silent room mocked back at him. ‘I shall go mad’, he said, and again the echoes repeated, ‘Mad!
mad! mad!’” Jack senses Yuki - but he cannot see her. He plunges into a state of monomania, his
senses heightened dramatically. Hearing the cacophony of the bells nearby, he engages in an
internal dialogue echoing the poetics of Edgar Allan Poe:
Would they never cease? Why were they so loud? They had not been so formerly. Now
they filled all the land with their ringing. What were they tolling for, and, ah, why had the
ghostly visitants of his house caught up the tone, and softly, sweetly, with piercing
cadence, chanted back and echoed the sighing of the bells? (169)
The reader, if they have been following Eaton’s lead and identifying with Jack’s Western
authority throughout the tale, is unexpectedly forced to experience a sense of smallness at the toll
of these ominous bells. Once more a kind of sadomasochism puts readers in the uncomfortable
position of embodying, and then fleeing from, dynamisms of gendered and cultural difference.
The madness and “hysteria” Eaton summons is in ways more daunting than the contrived
suicide of Long’s one-dimensional caricature. Lionel Lambourne, in his study of Japonisme,
overlooks this Gothic element, proclaiming Eaton’s fiction to be less artistic because, when
compared to Long’s fiction, it holds to be “far less tragic” (Lambourne, 146). However, at the
close of The Japanese Nightingale, the uncomfortable overtones remind one of a funeral parlor,
stirring emotions less familiar and less resolved than Long’s “tragic” dénouement. Jack, lured
into a fantasy world, a romanticized “escape,” transforms him into a specter outside of modernity.
He intones at Yuki’s command: “Yes, forever” (Watanna 2002, 171). The bells cease, but only

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after Jack seals himself within the world of bewitching phantoms. Behind this potency, an
essential inquiry remains: though readers are given an opportunity to explore schisms within
their identification in the early twentieth century, are the final options available to readers of
Eaton’s fiction an alignment with subjugated maidens or abject monsters?
Situating Japonisme within the Female Gothic
In measuring their originality, Eaton, Wayman, and Fraser should not be made exempt
from claims of Orientalizing their subject matter. These novels, though regularly innovative, are
guilty at times of transforming the “feminine” and the Far East into one-dimensional Others for
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consumption.

“Japan’s” supposed connection to the “feminine” loses some of its effectiveness

as a Gothic trope due to the superficiality of its commercialized construction. In the works this
chapter considers, the message is muddied by trendy, and thus readily dismissed, exotica. This
avenue for self-expression succumbed to conscription by popular resolution, eventually recontaining the potency these works briefly contemplate. Furthermore, instead of striving to
humanize the subjects, the authors exaggerate grotesque features of the country and its women so
as to entertain the intended audience, fostering foggy abstraction. In this way, the texts fall into
related traps as those of McCall, Fenollosa, and Hearn. All strove to utilize an imaginary “Japan”
to surpass modernity’s limits but, in so doing, lost sight of the shared humanity, and historical
energies, being obscured in the process.
Regardless, it would be irresponsible to overlook the complexity of these texts. Juliann E.
Fleenor, for one, does not draw attention to these hybridizations in her mapping of the Female
Gothic, arguing the genre “uses the traditional spatial symbolism of the ruined castle or an
enclosed room to symbolize both the culture and the heroine” (Fleenor, 15). As this chapter has

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sought to demonstrate, settings in a Female Gothic tradition were scarcely confined to the
decaying archetypes of Western life. More than simple profit-driven capitalists, these writers
revived tired formulas by blending the themes at their disposal in order to interrogate - with
varying degrees of severity - the boundaries, gendered and cultural, established by Western
patriarchy at the turn of the century. These authors repeatedly concern themselves with the
unrepresentable, what lies beyond a mechanized, circumscribed social reality (in most cases, the
constraints of fin-de-siecle domesticity).72 Scholar Barbara Claire Freeman notes:
The feminine sublime is neither a rhetorical mode nor an aesthetic category but a domain
of experience that resists categorization, in which the subject enters into relation with an
otherness – social, aesthetic, political, ethical, erotic – that is excessive and
unrepresentable. (Freeman, 2)
Depictions of “Japan” and the “feminine” fit well within Freeman’s purview, conceptualized as
excessive by nature, thereby “resisting categorization.”
In conclusion, I do not wish to suggest a dramatic change in the problematic binaries
between Self and Other re-articulated by these texts. But this type of excavation, it can be argued,
complicates the ways in which this binary has been formulated and allows one to reconsider the
perceived agency, or lack thereof, among female artists who participated in the transaction. As
Freeman notes, a “female sublime” allows for “a radical re-articulation of the role gender plays
in producing the history of discourse on the sublime and the formulation of an alternative
position with respect to excess and the possibilities of its figuration” (Freeman, 10). Unlike ChoCho-san’s (in)famous complacency, these texts fundamentally compromise the stability of
Western male hegemony by offering haunted characters who refuse to be stilled. While these

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writers undoubtedly conflate Otherness in a troubling fashion, rendering “Japan” as well as
“femininity” eternally “abnormal,” they also expose complex productions of identity at risk of
being lost among piles of discarded curios.

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Godzilla is Dead
Nuclear Criticism and a Deferred Reading of the Toho Terror

Godzilla is a complex and multifaceted pop idol, embedded in intricate networks of cultural
signification and personal meaning. (Tsutsui 2006, 7)

From the outset nuclear energy was personalized… The Bomb, capitalized like a creature from
myth. (Weart, 104)

In 1984, a group of scholars from a variety of disciplines gathered at Cornell to discuss
the role of critical theory in ongoing discussions surrounding the issue of nuclear proliferation.
Their collective goal, as stated in the introduction to the Diacritics issue to follow, was
straightforward: “Critical theory ought to be making a more important contribution to the public
discussion of nuclear issues” (Klein, 2). The dialogue on that summer day, however, was much
less straightforward; attempts to established framework for Nuclear Criticism, granting it
cohesion, never quite materialized, echoing a growing gap perceived between a discipline mired
in the legacy of New Criticism and a public with seemingly real concerns such as total war.
Twenty years later, at the University of Kansas, a different group of intellectuals gathered, this
time to discuss the cinematic child of the nuclear event: Godzilla. Their goal was likewise clear,
articulated in the introduction of the resultant book, In Godzilla’s Footsteps, as the desire to
position the big green signifier “within a matrix of meaning-laden cultural references and
political valences” (Tsutsui 2006, 5). Although Nuclear Criticism does not appear overtly within

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these discussions, the uncertainties surrounding how to read “nuclear texts” were awoken once
again, as though from a deep slumber in some deep Pacific basin.
Nuclear Criticism, as a loosely defined critical endeavor, has sought at various periods in
history to answer the question how one is to read texts in a world which must routinely
contemplate the absolute obliteration of nuclear blasts. How would one tell the story of nuclear
annihilation, which cannot help but remain absolute speculation, mired in the realm of pure
science fiction - as no one will be there afterwards to place the event in a larger narrative
context? Was this indeed the heart of post-structuralism, the tipping point in which the signifier
and the signified are torn irrevocably apart? Or, in contrast, might one begin to mend the
fragments of the shattered relationship, building bridges between these critics and the so-called
“real world”? The unsettled answers reveal a division prevalent in the second half of twentieth
century Western thought. My goal is to attempt to appreciate the discussion as a whole, noting its
inherent value while advocating respectful conversation as a strength of Godzilla scholarship
capable of speaking to critical discourse more broadly conceived (including, importantly, the
work undergone by the chapter itself).
The latex monster put forth by Toho Studios in 1954 is perhaps the “nuclear text” par
excellence. It has become, in many ways, the face of nuclear destruction, an icon encapsulating
the breadth of the controversy and a signifier struggling to touch on that most unspeakable of
moments: the nuclear event. How one reads Godzilla, and its breed of sequels, reveals profound
concern surrounding the value of critical theory and the debates over the methods with which
one can position the “nuclear” in popular discourse. Reading Godzilla is an interpretive act restaging many of the debates that took place at Cornell in 1984, suggesting a broader rift within

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interpretive communities following the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 8th,
1945.
To understand this schism better, one might first consider the critical response to another
text linked directly to atomic fears, John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946). Two critics, Patrick B.
Sharp and Alan Nadel, present opposing readings and illustrate the diverging perspectives
focused upon by this essay. For example, Sharp reads Hersey’s “non-fiction novel” as perhaps
the apex of literary modernism, placing the text in relation to modernist forms espoused by T.S.
Eliot in The Waste Land. Sharp finds Hersey’s “reinvention” of official rhetoric, as well as his
ability to shift modes, to be an effective model “to capture the unique and horrifying
consequences of life in the modern world” (Sharpe, 149). He places Hersey within a particular
canonical trajectory, portraying Hiroshima as a part of the cultural landscape, with the potential
to revise older discursive techniques and provide an alternative method of communicating. In
short, Sharp argues that Hersey borrows modernist tropes, such as fragmentation and skepticism
towards narrative authority, to position the dropping of the atomic bomb as an appropriate
expression of modernist angst, not unfamiliar at the time and thus, to some degree, conditioned
by a causal chain of literary and historical developments.
In contrast to Sharp’s viewpoint, Alan Nadel understands Hersey’s work as a model for
demonstrating how the postmodern crisis stems from atomic discourse. He argues Hiroshima
“can never create a totalizing narrative,” as it is built on a purely arbitrary structure of narrative
authority (Nadel, 54). Nadel capitalizes on such an interpretive turn to reinvigorate the nuclear
issue and endorse a framework for interpretation privileging playfulness and the deconstruction
of textual oppression. He views Hersey’s book as “a profound decentering of authority, not only
in the political, scientific, or social arenas but also in the realm of writing” (55). Due to the
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perceived meaninglessness of the devastation, Nadel’s reading of Hersey contends that
Hiroshima (the novel) is an analogue for the meaninglessness of the event itself. As a
consequence, literature does not, or can no longer, make sense of the world and the senseless
deeds of man. Although Sharp and Nadel never formally align themselves with a rather
amorphous Nuclear Criticism, their discrepancies illuminate the crux of a critical problem, one
stubbornly refusing to disperse – from textual shambles, will critics, authors, and readers alike
harness “nuclear texts” as an opportunity for deconstruction or an opportunity to re-connect
discourse to social connectedness?
Godzilla serves as an excellent case study to examine how critics understand “nuclear
texts.” How one continues to read the fire-breathing lizard reveals how hermeneutics has evolved
in the framing of the nuclear from 1984 until today. Ultimately, I believe what one finds in
secondary discourse is significantly more revealing than the American love affair with Godzilla.
After all, the monster delights viewers or disturbs them, engages them or rolls their eyes, evokes
their dread or trivializes it. If Godzilla is the legacy of the nuclear event that persists the longest
in popular culture, beyond heated protests, beyond reactionary shifts in public opinion, beyond
the now-fading potential of Nuclear Criticism itself, then it is perhaps to Godzilla’s footsteps that
one must return in order to re-consider the position of readers within the act of nuclear
speculation. One emerges in reverence of Godzilla’s awesome power (symbolizing History,
national might, the split atom, language) or laughing at its figurative death as a source of
legitimate fear, squealing at the havoc of a man-made monster finally cut free. Or perhaps, in a
contemporary society that tends to forget the nuclear threat is still as alive today as it was in 1945,
a return to Godzilla will promote a continued dialogue concerning our attitudes toward The
Bomb.
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To analyze Godzilla and Nuclear Criticism in these terms is in many ways to re-visit the
tenets of textual analysis. From the sheer power of atomic weaponry, which renders the act of
archiving meaning to be either tedious or vital, the production and consumption of literary or
cinematic artifacts is called into question. I survey the divisions these two lines of critical inquiry
share in order to establish what I find to be Godzilla’s most significant message: the goal of
reading Godzilla as a stand-in the nuclear event is never to destroy it but to debate its meaning
from countless perspectives. The same can then be said for all language in the years following
the dropping of The Bomb. Disagreement over the meaning of the signifier, in this case a lizard
standing three-stories tall, despite the hurling of missives from respective bunkers, reminds one
of the potency in such exchanges. Amidst the rubble of words, I argue, is a simple reminder that
criticism has no victor, only the endless deferral of obliteration and the privileging of
negotiations over silence.
Godzilla: Making Meaning out of the Monster
Godzilla is inseparable from the atomic Bomb. The giant lizard, an amalgamation of the
nuclear event and the primal myths of Japanese lore, first began stomping on Japanese citizens in
Ishiro Honda’s Gojira (1954). From there, the monster was re-made into an American version
and quickly grew into a global sensation.

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The fire-breathing mug has appeared on everything

from lunch boxes to formal dinnerware. Over the course of the lengthy film series, the message
of the films has shifted; topics have ranged from the mundane to the most pressing, influenced
by a multitude of cultural anxieties spanning over fifty years (as we shall see in the examples I
have chosen). The crisis of representation and criticism which follow the close of World War II
shapes the fate of Godzilla. Like the nuclear event, like The Bomb itself, Godzilla undergoes a
variety of paradoxical associations and acquires new meaning over the years. Yet within the
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nature of each of these elements (Godzilla, The Bomb), there is something un-representable that
is nevertheless continually articulated. At the heart rests a nuclear origin, an explosive moment
that, not unlike the Nietzschean adage “God is Dead,” forces the twentieth century subject to
confront how they value collective narratives in the face of mutually assured destruction. Making
of meaningfrom the monster across the decades, though superficially covering a range of topical
concerns, is a persistent return to the trouble of making meaning at all in a world exposed to
images of nuclear capability.
Reading Godzilla as a “nuclear text” subsequently leads many critical voices of the beast
to retreat to familiar paradigms. In various cases, the films are interpreted as intimately linked to
a vast psychological, social, or historical narrative; Godzilla itself is incorporated into a
“meaningful” trajectory. For these scholars, archiving remains relevant, despite its tenuous
position at the mercy of a theoretical atomic apocalypse. The branch of criticism that encouraged
these kinds of readings was widely felt in Nuclear Criticism as well as in scholars who try to
uncover the meaning of one of Japan’s most iconic creature. This approach is at its core a
reconnection of the representation to the thing-itself. It refuses to allow “nuclear texts” to fall
into nihilism by filling the potential void with substantial events, narratives, and projected Truths.
Interpretations along these lines have often involved diagnosing the people who created
or suffered from The Bomb and those who enjoy (fear?) watching the resultant Godzilla films.
This psychoanalytic approach seeks to re-establish a cause-and-effect, a teleology that seemed
thoroughly at first dislodged in the chaotic moment of nuclear explosions. Following the
Freudian model of a deterministic unconscious, as well as a Jungian model of collective
psychosis, these works attempt to understand Godzilla as a visual condensation of our greatest
anxieties, frequently overlooking the conscious, constructed nature of the narratives themselves.
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Authors in this vein insist Godzilla is our way of coping with The Bomb through an expression
of our deficiencies and deepest neurosis. Barash and Lipton, for example, in The Caveman and
the Bomb, locate in nuclear discourse a childish mentality towards “wargasm” (Barash and
Lipton, 44). The book advocates “curing” this mentality through various means. The Bomb, for
Barash and Lipton, is comprehended through well-worn psychoanalytic terms such as “phallus”
and “womb.” To some degree, this serves as an effort to codify an otherwise unfathomable event
and classify it as expressive output among troubled individuals. Likewise, Godzilla has been read
by various scholars as an expression of stunted growth, youthful stomping and perverse
destruction. All Monsters Attack (1969), directed by original Gojira director Ishiro Honda, can be
interpreted along these lines. A young boy Ichiro, dealing with bullying in school and a
neglectful father, escapes to Monster Island in the realm of dreams and must overcome his fears
to emerge from the attack unscathed and solve his real troubles at home. In similar fashion,
speaking at the University of Kansas conference, Barak Kushner interprets Godzilla “like a
social catharsis, aiding individuals in venting their long-repressed fears and anger” (Kushner, 44).
WGodzilla and The Bomb thus supply direct answers for those living through a deeply troubling
crisis in the aftermath of Hiroshima.
Supporting a parallel goal, certain authors read Godzilla as a stand-in for The Bomb
through a myth-and-symbol lens. Spencer Weart examines at length the symbolic value attached
to “nuclear texts,” such as Einstein’s talismanic sign E = MC2. He finds discourse surrounding
the concept of the nuclear to be a variable junkyard of signification and then meticulously reconstructs meaning from the pieces scattered across Western history. He calls these “old,
autonomous features of our society, our culture, and our psychology” (Weart, 421). Mark
Anderson’s reading of Godzilla unearths treasures from a common heap, seizing from the film a
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message he argues we have long been hoarding there: “Nature itself, the definition and source of
Japanese purity, has been rendered monstrous and impure” (Anderson, 33). Anderson and Weart
consider the “nuclear text” as an artifact comprised of specific meanings. It is the critic’s job to
make these claims through rigorous location of the meaning in question. In so doing, the reader
will once again comprehend a world previously gone mad and restored to order by the critic; in
truth, my essay is hardly exempt from such a process. I read Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for
Earth (1992) with an approach that echoes many of these critical concerns: Mothra, symbolic of
Nature, is violated by Godzilla, the creation of mankind. The constant reference to “balance”
might be interpreted as symptomatic of Japan’s Zen philosophy; in terms of cultural history, one
might find a critique of Japan’s rapid industrialization at the expense of its natural splendor. Joan
Bernardi, who also spoke in Kansas, espoused an approach for teaching Godzilla to students that
heavily relies on an ambition she shares with these critics. She argues “familiarity with this
history and its visual impact is critical to a full appreciation of Godzilla” (Bernardi, 122
emphasis mine). “Making sense” of Godzilla, studying its history and its reception, will,
according to these authors, among whom I must recognize my own goals, allow one to form a
cohesive narrative concerning what dropping The Bomb “really means” for Nature and society.
Examples abound of critics reading Godzilla as allegorical of social concerns. Tom
Miller, interprets the Godzilla franchise as an elaborate allegory: “Godzilla represents more than
the A-Bomb; Godzilla is the United States itself” (Miller). Miller pulls from the tale a political
dynamic, suggesting a power struggle between the United States and Japan. In theory, from
viewing Gojira and its sequels, one can access how the Japanese feel collectively about the
United States; conversely, from watching the American re-make from 1956 featuring Raymond
Burr, one can also discover the attitudes of U.S. citizens toward Japan. Yoshikuni Igarashi’s
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paper from In Godzilla’s Footsteps echoes Miller’s position, with only slightly different results:
“Godzilla embodies… the past of pre-industrial labor conditions that persisted despite the new
regime of the high-growth economy. The dark, rough surface of the monster’s body resonates
with memories of the bodily hardship that was common in rural Japan” (Igarashi, 95). The task
for many Godzilla critics, in other words, is one of articulating what exactly Godzilla
“embodies.” In these terms, when one watches a film such as Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972), it is
relatively easy to trace the origin of Godzilla’s symbolism. In the film, aliens bring technology to
Japan. Godzilla must save the world from the menace, therefore transforming into a complex
symbol for native resistance rather than for mankind’s nuclear ambition. According to the logic
of the film, technology only produces hakai (destruction). Godzilla’s strength comes from a
mystical, primitive power within both Japan and Nature, a message also referencing the on-going
conflict in Vietnam. In the aftershock of The Bomb – and one does indeed still feel the tremors –
the impulse among certain critics has been to read such collective works not as ironic but as
communal material, evidence of speakable Truths, a kind of survivalist need to comprehend what
lies beneath the nihilistic dreams unleashed at the close of the Second World War.
It is important to note that these debates have been instigated not only by nuclear
speculation but also by the so-called “culture wars” of the 1980s and 90s. On one side stood the
post-structuralists, as will be discussed later in the essay, emphasizing an atomic breakdown of
metaphysical systems. On the other side stood those trying to re-assert value judgment into the
study of culture. Nuclear Criticism was no exception and was, in fact, one of the moments in
which the extremes of each position were best revealed. Jeff Smith, for example, utilizes postapocalyptic opportunism to call for “the reconstruction of some better metaphysics” (Smith, 133).
Elsewhere, Solomon confirms a pragmatic shift, labeling the nuclear event “an epistemological
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challenge to think through the consequences of our general textualization of critical knowledge,
our unrelenting deconstruction of the referent, of the belief in a physical world” (Solomon, 31).
Within his nuanced reading, Solomon argues one can interpret “nuclear texts” for their
potentiality, their calculated likelihood of expressing reality, instead of the immediate insistence
on the impossibility of the task. These value-laden readings are re-iterated in many
interpretations of Godzilla as well. Susan Napier, borrowing Andrew Tudor’s term “secure
horror,” envisions a predictable pattern emerging with Godzilla: “the forces of destruction come
from outside and are vanquished” (IGF, 333). Her authoritative labeling of the formula echoes
Smith and Solomon’s efforts to chart a readable narrative in the after-math of the nuclear event.
James Sterngold agrees: “The people wanted to lash out at what they saw as the brutality of the
nuclear age. But how? Enter the puffy latex monster.” All of these frameworks summon, at some
level, metaphysics from a time before the allure of post-structuralism had emerged in the
academy. They conjure an cohesive plot, positioning themselves as omniscient figures looking
down over the unfolding logic of a society producing exactly what it needs, gradually answering
questions created via cinematic works.
This resistance to the complete breakdown of meaning does not seem to have a limit to its
retreat. Seeking to use the “nuclear moment” in order to articulate a more “human humanities,”
certain figures at the Cornell conference in 1984 evoked nostalgia for older modes of
communication. McConnell saw “a post-Copernican cosmology recentered around a finite Earth
with its elements of fire, air, and water; songs and chants about interconnectedness and respect
for the planetary planet” (McConnell, 59); Mary Ann Caws predicted resistance to this model,
warning that “no holding-together impulse is laughable, not even our desperate attempts at
conversing and at singing as we can” (Caws, 70). Going significantly further than works
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previously discussed, these authors would delight in the spectacle of Godzilla as a communal
moment in which each member of the audience escapes the dread of The Bomb not through
thinking but through a shared sensation of nuclear sublimity.
These scholars advocate reading the texts of an atomic age with a traditional lens.
Unwilling to revel in meaninglessness exposed, they instead advocate the safety and security of
meaning. Godzilla serves as an opportunity to define our relationship to The Bomb with
enhanced clarity. The big green signifier offers a focal point around which one can determine
social anxieties, the subtle movements of History, as well as rhetorical bridges between peoples.
This model places Godzilla firmly in the vision of Jonathan Schell’s widely-read treatise, The
Fate of the Earth (1982):
It is also the readers, listeners, and viewers, who while they are in the presence of a work
of art are made contemporary with it and, in a way, with all other readers, listeners, and
viewers, in all ages… it testifies to our common humanity. (Schell, 162 emphasis mine)
He adds, “Let us connect… the wholeness and meaning of life” (230). Godzilla has at various
times served Schell’s purpose nicely, giving scholars a chance to articulate a cohesive
“wholeness” and to once again make meaning out of “nuclear texts ” – and all other texts, for
that matter.
Yet a resurgence of metaphysical charters among a variety of critical thinkers does not
preclude interjections of uncertainty. Susan Sontag’s seminal essay “The Imagination of
Disaster” expresses ambivalence towards the representation of nuclear disaster. On one level, she
explains away the chaos of the concept by finding within it a modern explanation: “the image
derives most of its power from a supplementary and historical anxiety, also not experienced
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consciously by urban life” (Sontag, 223). However, perhaps the most intriguing fact about
Sontag’s reading is an acknowledgment within it of a loss of referent that accompanies, and thus
refutes, her diagnosis. She admits, despite her authoritative interpretation of why we delight in
destruction, humanity is “always perilously close to insanity and unreason” (223). Unreason
gives the edges of her essay an unsettling quality, undermining the determinism that appears to
be at work in her prescriptive “historical anxiety.” Sontag does not refuse this, walking a thin
line between what she views as “twin specters”: “For we live under continual threat of two
equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror”
(224). While Sontag is describing the “unremitting banality” of the modern condition as reflected
in films such as Gojira, an endless line of signification seemingly surprised by nothing, she
cannot deny the alternative analysis, one that emerges from within this banality, predicated on
the very same conditions: that of a total breakdown of meaning. Sontag’s position, always “very
close to unreason” (and the obliteration of the line between signified and signified), manifests the
gray area of criticism surrounding “nuclear texts” and the “twin specters” which make it difficult
to understand fully our attraction to the Toho terror.
Godzilla is Dead: The (Un)making of Meaning
Echoing Sontag, Chon Noriega’s oft-cited essay on Godzilla, “Godzilla and the Japanese
Nightmare,” reveals the difficulty in pinning down the exact meaning of the monster. The essay
describes a “nuclear dialectic,” which implicates a textual restlessness at the heart of the series.
Noriega notes, “Godzilla films provide an opportunity to challenge our constructions of the Self
and the Other” (Noriega, 64). Godzilla, in short, is the Other, a problematic depiction of the
atomic bomb as a ruthless atrocity committed by a destructive United States to end World War II
as well as the Self, an equally problematic embodiment of Japanese national strength and
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“primitive power.” This dialectic refuses a stable comprehension of The Bomb or its after-shocks
rippling across the cultural landscape: “(The Japanese) must name (textualize) the absent cause”
(72). The impossibility of the task says much about the impossibility of any naming, supported
by the rise of post-structuralist theory in the academy. Still, the essay appears to resist fully
diving into treating the film as bricolage or absolute play: “Unfortunately, Godzilla (horror) films
are not perceived historically, but aesthetically” (74, emphasis mine). Noriega criticizes the
“nuclear dialectic” as devoid of any meaningful purpose; the unsettled signification is dismissed
as pure aestheticism, the rendering of a serious problem in unhelpful ways. What are we to do
with the pure playfulness so closely knit to the Godzilla franchise?
In 1984, the keynote speaker at the Cornell conference was none other than Jacques
Derrida, the forefather of a deconstructionist approach in the humanities. His presence alone
drew controversy, much of which was carry-over from the “culture wars” raging simultaneously.
Roger Luckhurst provides us with the historical setting by referring to one of the biggest critics
of Derrida’s presence in this debate, Christopher Norris: “Nowhere more obviously does Derrida
propose sophistical and ‘absurd’ arguments, nowhere does he move closer to ‘nihilist’ posturing’,
and nowhere more plainly are literary theorists employing a ‘loony’ version of deconstruction
than in Nuclear Criticism” (Luckhurst, 90). Lending Derrida’s framework to Nuclear Criticism
would, according to Norris, undermine any hope of legitimizing it in the national forum. K.K.
Ruthven’s attempts to provide an overview of Nuclear Criticism admit that this vein of
theorizing was likely its greatest failure.

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Regardless, Derrida did not remain silent.

His essay, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven
Missives),” is one of the most widely referenced work of Nuclear Criticism. In it, Derrida does
not stray far from his theoretical bread-and-butter. The essay argues that contemplating the
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nuclear event always-already relies upon a deconstructionist perspective. The nuclear event,
according to Derrida, is “fabulously textual… a nuclear war has not taken place: one can only
talk and write about it… a non-event” (Derrida, 23). Rather than raging against such textuality,
Derrida views this as confirmation that the text overwhelms the event, that all we have to work
with, all we can hope to change, is discourse itself. He warns his colleagues at the conference
against trying to re-connect the signifier and signified, insisting that to do so would be
reactionary and, furthermore, futile. Instead, he advises, one should take the event as an
opportunity to remember the “fabulously textuality” of all parts of human life. One of his closing
lines shuts the book on Nuclear Criticism with authoritative finality: “Deconstruction… belongs
to the nuclear age” (27). In truth, after this essay, the inverse became plausible – the nuclear age
might well belong to deconstructionists.
Certain readings of Godzilla, albeit less prevalent than those historicizing or diagnosing
the text and its reception, retain Derrida’s proclamation. Theodor Bestor, in his epilogue to the
collection from the conference on Godzilla’s influence, echoes the French theorist’s approach,
adding, “Like any good symbol, (Godzilla) travels well and keeps company with many, many
meanings” (Bestor, 201). Godzilla critics echo these sentiments on occasion, admitting that,
when it comes to Godzilla, play is unavoidably the thing. The monster will forever be openended, allowed to mean anything and everything at once. William Tsutsui, the leading expert on
Godzilla’s influence, succumbs to a Derridean turn: “The creature remains ever available as a
metaphor, ever compliant to interpretation and appropriation” (Tsutsui 2006, 11); he cites Peter
B. High’s apt description of the beast as “the perfect floating, empty metaphor” (207). Like
Derrida, Tsutsui depicts Godzilla as belonging to the same age that produced deconstruction as
well as the nuclear event (in which order is dependent on how closely one follows Derrida’s
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logic). Tsutsui’s methodology consistently pulls the rug out from under itself. His unwillingness
to treat the subject matter as “overly-serious” reminds one of deconstruction’s self-cannibalizing
form: “Overanalyzing and over-intellectualizing can rob the monster of the unbridled exuberance,
the devil-may-care abandon that is his greatest appeal. Don’t worry, be stompy” (213). This
playfulness allows us to appreciate Godzilla, and vicariously our depictions of The Bomb, for all
of their textual freedoms, their ability to side-step any and all concrete depictions or ready
political conclusions.

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This playfulness is not without ethical risks. To atomize meaning is, in

various cases, to lose sight of real-world ramifications and to lose the timbre of seriousness that
makes criticism relevant for the majority of readers, criticism which might instead aid these
individuals in resisting an array of oppressive ideologies being passed down through “harmless”
Godzilla products.
Despite ethical concerns, those seizing the nuclear trope persistently relish in textual
freedom. Jean Baudrillard, for one, uses the “nuclear” to articulate his broader critical agenda:
The atomic shadow, the only one left to us: not the sun’s shadow, nor even the shadows
of Plato’s cave, but the shadow of the absent, irradiated body, the delineation of the
subject’s annihilation of the disappearance of the original. (Baudrillard 1992, 105)
The nuclear event completely changed our imagination, Baudrillard argues, and thus the
connection between body and representation, origin and text, is forever destroyed. He supports
this claim through poetic liberties taken with the atomic weapon. Later, critic Akira Lippit
employs the trope in a similar fashion. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) [2005] interrogates the
impact of the nuclear event, hoping it provides a way to help us better grasp our postmodern
condition. It is again unclear which comes first, The Bomb or Derrida, or whether a physical

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bomb was even required to initiate this metaphorical exercise; Lippit, however, renders such
questions mute. He considers The Bomb to be part-and-parcel of the victory of text over event.
He sees the atomic light, manifested in cinematic terms, as a signifier for “the end of history… a
hypervisibility that renders the world blind, for an ecstatic instant colorless” (Lippit, 102).
Lippit’s reading re-enacts a Derridean Nuclear Criticism by insisting the nuclear event can only
be understood through its aesthetic potentiality. As with Baudrillard, the shadow is all. The trace
of humanity is what remains of a world figuratively exploded. All readings, in sum, are shadowreadings, without a chance of reclaiming the human reality that has been lost in the process.
Yet it must be recalled that Derridean Nuclear Criticism is not apolitical, just as Derrida
himself was hardly apolitical in orientation. Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now” emphasizes
the idea of speed in order to argue that the supreme goal of such criticism must be to slow things
down and stop texts from haphazardly (explosively) colliding with ill-advised meanings. Gillian
Brown too recognizes the devastating consequences of a reactionary reading of the nuclear
event:
As long as our concerns about nuclear holocaust maintain the logic of sequence,
they retain this scenario of the wagered self… the difficulty in which feminism is
placed, the predicament which we all face, implies that perhaps we should be less
concerned with what the nuclear annihilates than with what nuclear rhetoric reproduces. (G. Brown, 299 emphasis mine)
Pointing to the “logic of sequence” in official discourse surrounding nuclear armament and the
willingness of intellectuals to reproduce this logic, Brown echoes Derrida in refusing to fight
speedily against terrifying words, such as the promotion of nuclear war by government bodies,

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with still more faster words, such as the symbolic connection of “femininity” with “peace.” They
insist we slow down. Deconstruction serves Nuclear Criticism best, they would argue, when it is
pushing against the grain, urging us to reconsider how we articulate Truths to one another while
exposing our over-willingness to trust texts that are secretly devastating. These scholars, in
reference to Godzilla, would contend that viewing the monster as embodying “American
aggression” or a “Japanese national mythos” or any other host of meanings runs the risk of
advocating a reactionary, oppressive, and imminently flawed logic.
Aaron Gerow echoes Derrida’s concerns at the conference “In Godzilla’s Footsteps.”
Though far less controversial, his contribution forces one to consider once overlap between
Godzilla commentators and Nuclear Critics. Like Brown, Baudrillard, and Lippit, Gerow is
interested in the post-structuralist potential arising from nuclear texts. The “fabulous textuality”
of the monster opens possibilities for conceptualizing the nuclear event and the world left in its
wake: “Godzilla certainly is an intertextual beast… intertextual precisely because it has always
broken free of attempts to enclose its semiotic wanderings in a single text… (critics ought to)
celebrate this wandering textuality” (Gerow, 63 emphasis mine). Godzilla’s resistance to
circumscribed meaning, and its ability to absorb multiple perspectives, can be read as
symptomatic of all texts in an atomic age. This should not discourage us, Gerow writes, but
rather encourage us to open our untapped creative reservoirs - in fact, it may account for
Godzilla’s status as a beloved icon. Gerow closes with a warning to his fellow attendees:
We, as scholars, must be careful of where our spectatorship places us in the
continuing struggle over control of the meaning of the text. We should be wary of
which rays our methodological devices project, less we turn our kaiju (monster

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films) into manageable objects and miss out on the deliriously unstable pleasure
of wandering through the variety of intertexts and wrestling with monsters. (80)
If all texts that contemplate the nuclear event are, in essence, objects of pure aesthetic
speculation, Godzilla grants us an opportunity with which to “romp around a little more” (64).
We can explore our greatest fears, flex our historicizing muscles, and feel free to roll our eyes or
cling to the arm of a charitable friend. There may be hope yet to love The Bomb. It has given us
anew the gift of imagination, a chance to stop “over-intellectualizing” for once and indulge in
baser instincts of play.
Though I share certain metaphysical ambitions with the scholars discussed in the
previous section, I also choose to borrow the deconstructive perspective on occasion. In King
Kong vs. Godzilla (1965), a re-make of the Japanese version, King Kong and Godzilla are rather
improbably brought into contact with one another (the reason is not particularly clear – or
relevant, for that matter). The film flaunts its connection to “publicity,” deconstructing its own
message through campiness. The Pacific Pharmaceutical Co., run by a clownish CEO, creates the
spectacle by bringing the two towering lugs into contact. The audience is repeatedly reminded of
this event as a sheer “publicity stunt.” The American reporter, when explaining the convoluted
plot, says with tongue firmly in cheek: “One thing we’re sure of – they will produce one giant
advertisement campaign.” Television sets, binoculars, and juxtaposing news footage consistently
frame the film. At one point, the CEO of the company flips a coin to see who will win the battle,
shattering any heavy social weight that may have been connected to the final outcome; in another
scene, as two young men carry King Kong to face Godzilla with balloons and wire, one smiles,
forgetting for a moment the grim fate that has been forecasted for Japan, and exclaims: “Great
publicity!” The film itself signals the potential critic to dig for meaning at their peril. Attempting
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to read King Kong as solely an allusion to “America” and Godzilla as referring to “Japan” seems
stretched at best, and self-defeating at worst.
Similar post-structuralist readings often hide troublesome messages. In Godzilla vs. King
Ghidorah (1991), one could point to its disregard for narrative structure or the self-referential
moment when the viewer meets the protagonist, a writer of science fiction who wants to escape
the folly of the genre – by (wink, wink) interviewing a man who claims to have found a “real
dinosaur.” But this style of reading has the potential to overlook meaning-making that is
ethically disconcerting. At the height of “Japan Inc.,” the Japanese boom that saw the country
emerge as a seemingly viable threat to the United States’ status as the number one economy in
the world, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah was released. One can subsequently find an undercurrent
of hyper-nationalism in the text. Godzilla is revealed to have once saved Japan during the Second
World War, positioning the monster as an empowered mascot for the country. It was, the film
contends, Godzilla that first made the “miracle economy” in Japan possible. The villains of the
film, meanwhile, are three Americans who have returned to erase Godzilla from history in order
to reclaim global dominance. The film can be read as struggling to come to terms with Japanese
“power” and re-casting the nuclear event as both a blessing and a curse. Godzilla, standing in
once again for The Bomb, causes mass suffering and terror in the black-and-white footage set
during World War II but is later seen as a boon, allowing Japan to become a global economic
force. The political message exhibited in Godzilla vs. Ghidorah reveals a problematic ethics. The
film’s campiness and raw textuality, if embraced wholesale, masks a questionable narrative
revision of Japanese national identity or, elsewhere, an essentialist portrayal of “Japan” hiding
Western anxieties towards Japanese fascism, carried over from World War II and made manifest
once again in the midst of global competition. How one elects to read these films – indeed, all
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texts in an atomic era – challenges us as one must straddle a line between critical self-effacement
and pragmatic self-reflection.
Reading Godzilla as a “Nuclear Text”
The devastating tsunami of 2011, and resultant crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear
Plant, immediately placed Godzilla back in the media spotlight. Peter Wynn Kirby composed a
response in the New York Times, entitled “Japan’s Long Nuclear Disaster Film.” According to
Kirby’s assessment, this time, due to the sheer magnitude of the event in question, no cinematic
representation is required to activate political exigency or anti-nuclear sentiment. Kirby writes,
“We don’t need a disaster film to bring out the nuclear contradictions of Japanese society.” In
brief, Godzilla is dead. It is at precisely such a moment, I would respectfully contest, that debates
over how one reads Godzilla, and all “nuclear texts,” come back to life to remind one of the
value in critical conversation as an ends to itself.
After all, it seems there will always be a politically expedient example of nuclear power
run amuck. If it is not anxieties toward North Korea, it will be a sudden meltdown; if it is not a
meltdown, it will be a terrorist group “potentially” possessing the capability to construct these
weapons. Godzilla, in contrast, is an icon that has withstood the tests of time. It offers up a
material text around which we might converse, designated for self-questioning and the proposal
of solutions (however far-fetched or one-sided), and yes, even the levity of distraction. Godzilla
is a “nuclear text” that resists hermeneutic rigidity. Unlike 24 hour news cycles, it does not
privilege one position over another. And, perhaps most importantly, Godzilla gives substance to
a concept that is itself elusive, The Bomb. While nuclear power is shrouded in secrecy,
frequently forgotten or mis-understood by the general public, Godzilla could not be more

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extroverted. While discourse surrounding the nuclear seems to fall into hushed whispers, even
silence, Godzilla will not be ignored. And while undoubtedly the remains from Japan’s most
recent disaster will eventually give way to new things for the archipelago, I presume Godzilla
will not exit quietly.
In surveying the two strains of Godzilla criticism, and aligning them directly with
approaches taken among Nuclear Critics, there is a sense their distinctions mirror a schism
between those who continue to archive the world in ways they see as “meaningful” and, on the
other hand, those who recognize a fatal flaw in the very act of archiving. One might ask, upon
seeing the fissure running throughout Nuclear Criticism and criticism of Godzilla alike, why I
should even bother engaging in such a polemic. Even if Godzilla is not dead, one could
reasonably deduce, any hope of agreeing upon the monster’s meaning certainly is.
Peter Schwenger’s work, Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word,
attempts to deal with this interpretive crisis. The methodology Schwenger articulates allows the
critical reader to avoid further dispersing these critical particles, instead adopting deterrence, that
most optimistic of nuclear tropes. Schwenger finds an opportunity to engage in this exercise in
“nuclear texts,” such as David Brin’s The Postman and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Though
these texts are indeed deconstructive, opening themselves in order to challenge a prescribed
meaning, they do so in a way that is itself not prescriptive but encourages a democratic ethos.
While Derridean Nuclear Criticism is too often grounded on negation as solely the absence of
meaning, and narrative Nuclear Criticism too frequently arrives at naïve closure, one might step
back and view Godzilla through the pragmatic work of dialogue. In truth, “nuclear texts” do not
provide answers nor do they establish resolutions to the trials of our times. What they do provide,
Schwenger informs the reader, is a chance to debate and, more fundamentally, a chance to
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communicate with one another in a world in which official discourse numbs the underlying
complexity of the ideas involved. Schwenger writes: “If language is structure, it can help us to
make the world, to make something even of its unmaking” (Schwenger, 52). One must refuse to
negate the schisms in Nuclear Criticism and the analysis of Godzilla films but recall, in a
common sense fashion, their preeminent value: cultural criticism is a means to keep people
thinking, talking, and co-existing with one another. Schwenger celebrates what he labels as “the
sacrificial text” (87), the text which figuratively implodes upon itself in order to defer certainty
and with it, the horrors of silence. Godzilla has become a sacrificial icon along these lines. Thus
the monster, in line with what I have called the cosmopolitan Gothic, rather than succumbing to
disingenuous resolutions, holds in perfect tension the competing impulses of modernity. And so,
the monster’s recurring death, in films and in popular opinion, should be taken with both a grain
of salt and a timbre of seriousness. This allows the interpreter of Godzilla to retain potency as
one of the few collective spaces around which a discussion concerning nuclear disaster continues
in earnest.

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The Gizmo Effect
“Japan Inc.” and the American Nightmare

In the 1980s, Americans confronted what came to be known as “the Japan Problem.” The
post-war Japanese economy had been growing at an exponential rate, widely regarded in
American discourse as a “miracle”; the archipelago’s economic strength precipitated anxious
whispers Japan might soon overthrow America as the world’s so-called “number one” economy.
The perception Japanese companies were investing heavily in American real estate resurrected
Hearstian fears of yet another “yellow peril.” Japan was subsequently demonized in American
discourse, a phenomenon the lexicon described controversially as “Japan bashing.”

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This

chapter will examine the two dominant forms through which “Japan Inc.” was articulated as a
source of anxiety for the American audience. “Japan Inc.,” framed by tropes of the supernatural,
came to signify a deeply-felt unease over the values of American-style capitalism in the late
stages of its development. I will thus seek to understand how important variations to the horror
genre, and its cross-disciplinary applications, emerged around the increasingly complicated task
of representing “Japan Inc.” for American audiences.
A gradual transition away from Communism as the predominant threat to Americans did
not seem to alleviate portrayals of economic fear. Vilified “Commies” were slowly interchanged
with sneaky “Japs,” cunning and unwieldy in their threat to the American way of life.

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Allusions to this transfer in popular books on Japan (fictional and non-fictional) are innumerable,
ranging from the suggestive to the overt. Pat Choate, along with other neo-conservative writers,
utilized this transition to test the mettle of his readers: “What are the demands of patriotism in a
world where global economic rivalry has replaced the Cold War?” (Choate, 213). Christopher
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Wood further antagonizes: “With the end of the cold war and with its middle class mired in the
worst downturn since the 1930s, America needed a new enemy” (Wood 1992, 16 – 7). The
copious references to a nascent war between capitalist superpowers suggest American capitalism
is habitually dependent on an alternative, demonized economic system in order to re-articulate
and re-define itself.

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In this chapter, I will examine two modes used to express the post-Cold War conversion:
“Japan Inc.” as the feared Other and “Japan Inc.” as the feared Same. A more familiar paradigm,
“Japan Inc.” as a feared Other, reflects “Japan Inc.” as a monstrosity, as sheer excess, as
unbridled capitalism run amuck. Linked to a rise in economic nationalism, this mode exploits an
anxiety towards difference and the mystique of cultural Others. American consumers are told to
retreat back into their isolationist bunkers and stave off the foreign invasion. In sharp contrast,
“Japan Inc.” as the feared Same expresses the monsters of “Japan Inc.” as pastiche rather than
authentic objects of fear. This anxiety is based on a fear of sameness, stemming from the first
Bush administration’s claim Japan was “just like us,” a revelation that, with the loss of an
imaginary “East,” the imagined “West” would likewise become transparent.

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This phenomenon,

what I term here as “the Gizmo effect,” turns past the expulsion of the monster in the traditional
sense of confronting the Other and destroying it. Therefore, supernatural depictions of “Japan
Inc.” either edify, in the first mode, a recognizable modern monster; or, inverted, they expose the
spectral echoes of a postmodern condition.
To start this conversation, one must analyze these two modes of monstrous excess as they
posited the definitive traits of an imaginary “Japan Inc.” Each mode utilized the hyperbole of the
fantastic. Theoretically, creating “Japan Inc.” as the Other allowed the American spectator to re-

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assert a “traditional core,” a terra firma that had been lost as well as an anticipatory nostalgia for
the City on the Hill promises of American capitalism. The first section of this chapter will
consequently address the intersection of popular cinema with the plethora of popular economics
texts concerning the Japanese model that arose in the mid-1980s, teasing out the common thread
of abject Otherness. This, however, was not Orientalism in Edward Said’s well-known sense of
the term; in its place, the form began to show signs of slipping into a different phenomenon
entirely.
The chapter will conclude by probing into this slippage, exemplified by Joe Dante’s
Gremlins (1984), to reveal how “Japan Inc.” grants American audiences an alternative breed of
monster, one challenging older forms of cultural representation as well as fundamental notions of
monstrosity. This is a suggestive move away from the usual formula of Self/Other routinely
comprising “Japan bashing” (indeed, Orientalism at large) into a more complex representation:
the rise of an Other that is a mere simulation of Otherness. As theorist Jean Baudrillard writes,
“The elevation of a value to universality is a prelude to its becoming transparent, which itself is a
prelude to its disappearance” (Baudrillard 1992, 105). Problematic discourse surrounding the socalled New World Order, the hastily presumed coming of a universalized capitalism, was
accompanied, in Dante’s film, by a suggestive collapse of the binaries previously defining global
politics. Gremlins thus presents to the audience a substitute, one indicating a significant shift in
American discourse from the paradigm of a demonized “Japan” toward “the Gizmo effect,” an
anxiety monsters might vanish altogether from the global community.
Excess and Enigma: A Camera without Film

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The “Japan Problem” was routinely demarcated by the supernatural (i.e., “Japan” as
outside of the natural, a problematic signifier of pure excess); Slavoj Žižek recurrently labels
these tendencies as the “stupid first impression.” In the 1980s, “Japan” as a feared Other
appeared in the popular economics sections of bookstores. Countless works were written about
“Japan Inc.,” many of them becoming bestsellers. These texts combine the language of fear and
assumed cultural Truths in exceedingly eclectic ways. The rhetoric of the day remained infused
with Reaganesque populism, “turning politics into myth and religion” (Erickson 1985: 100). The
heightened language of other-worldly visions carried over into pages preaching economic
nationalism.
The strongest example of this phenomenon has since become widely recognized as a
cornerstone of “Japan bashing,” Karel van Wolferen’s Enigma of Japanese Power (1990). Van
Wolferen’s work explores Japanese-style capitalism as the disconcerting foundation of Japanese
society. His scathing critique of “Japan Inc.” illustrates a belief that the archipelago’s economic
success is actually a mutation of the fundamental promises of capitalism, read here as a World
System from which Japan has deviated. The language of the supernatural permeates van
Wolferen’s work, elevating Japanese capitalism to the status of a pagan religion, indoctrinating
its misguided victims:
Communist ideology has […] spawned a class of exegeters and a pseudo-priesthood. It
invests those who use it with the greatest power of religious fervor expended in the name
of a superior goal. In some ways Japanism is an even more effective surrogate religion
than communism, because it is less examined, more taken for granted and more
inescapable. (Van Wolferen, 274 emphasis mine)

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Van Wolferen discredits what he labels “Japanism” as an inauthentic substitution for religion - in
this case, the “sacred principles” of American modes of capitalism. He employs vitriolic terms
such as “spawned” and “pseudo-priesthood,” imagery conjuring “Japan” as a deviant cult.
Previously, of course, Communism was portrayed in similar terms. Billy Graham once declared,
“My own theory about Communism is that it is masterminded by Satan. I think there is no other
explanation for the tremendous gains of Communism in which they seem to outwit us at every
turn, unless they have supernatural power” (Fitzgerald, 130 – 31). Yet “Japan Inc.” is evoked as
being even more diabolical, dehumanized with deeper levels of secrecy, infiltrating the lives of
innocent Americans. Even for the authoritative van Wolferen, Japanese capitalism appears to be
“inescapable,” a mysterious force outside of reality with the potential to possess American
citizens, regardless of their will. In the rendering of “Japan Inc.” as a satanic cult, the cult lacks
any agenda, manifesting satanic corruption as a ubiquitous “fervor” rather than as a direct
combatant (even Communists, after all, were read as meaningful, even if that meaning was
despicable). Following the populist lead of “common sense” combined with sensational rhetoric,
these economists elevate “Japan Inc.” as an entity far more penetrating than the usual suspects.
On a nearby bookshelf, horror fiction, in ways similar to that of popular economics, was
likewise providing a demonology to explain the rise of the Japanese economy. Graham
Masterton’s Tengu is a horror novel based on a simple premise: the Japanese, still enraged over
Hiroshima, have decided to unleash a supernatural force (an adaptation of a figure from Japanese
mythology, the tengu) upon the unfortunate victims of America, in an attempt at revenge
“through economic attack and through any other means at their disposal” (Masterton, 374). The
force in question takes the form of evil Japanese hit-men, donning Noh masks from Japanese
traditional theatre. Masterton’s imagined invasion of America by these bizarre creatures,
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embodiments of “Japan Inc.,” is as extreme in its disregard for sexual mores as it is in its graphic
scenes of gore. One Japanese temptress whispers, “We are a people possessed” (320). The force
behind this enemy goes beyond any line of rationality – it is mystical, penetrating, and allconsuming. Jerry, the American veteran who serves as the protagonist, faces the monsters with
terror:
For the first time in his life he was up against something completely unstoppable;
something which refused to obey any of the laws of nature… this thing, whatever it was,
was supernatural, a ghost or a ghoul or a zombie, a thing that was undead and couldn’t be
killed by any conventional weapons, or defeated by any conventional prayers. (298)
This demonology, the myth of unsavory agents doling out the violence of Japanese capitalism,
follows no rules. No law or morality could hope to contain it.
Van Wolferen’s monstrous sentiency is described, in equally ominous terms, as “the
System.” “The System” functions beyond man’s control. For van Wolferen, unlike Christianity,
or the supposedly synonymous American capitalism, this deterministic authority is relentless in
its amoral appetite. “The System – ubiquitous, intangible, enveloping, absorptive – has seen a
threat and neutralized it” (52). Van Wolferen writes of “the System” as an organizing force
based solely on self-perpetuation: “If the System is guided by an overriding, sacrosanct aim, it is
its own survival” (433). He perceives “Japan Inc.” to be nihilistic, expressing itself only through
“ideas divorced from the context… the outside world had become a bazaar… disjointed, illdigested bits and pieces of knowledge… unregulated by transcendental concepts” (239 – 244).
“The System” therefore obeys no logic (ironically, for a “System” supposedly empty at its heart,
van Wolferen is able to articulate its inner-workings with a high degree of certainty). R. Taggart

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Murphy, who reflects in The Weight of the Yen that he counts meeting van Wolferen “among the
most significant events in my life,” describes “the System” with correspondingly excessive
overtones, calling any study of its processes “Theory F – F standing for ‘fear’”; its intricate
network hides “masked coercion” and give “Japan Inc.” a “surreal, theatrical aspect” (Murphy
19; 56). In essence, van Wolferen and followers such as Murphy view Japanese capitalism as
inducing a mindless trance in its victims.

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Van Wolferen likewise interprets ‘The System’ as entirely without definable purpose:
“There is no political core to this geographical centre… like groping in the proverbial bucket of
eels […] elusive […] things are rarely what they seem” (van Wolferen, 27). “Japan” offers an
icon for Western anxiety moving into a New World Order. However, to bypass any true selfreflection that might occur during this event, van Wolferen distinguishes “Japan Inc.” as entirely
comprised of gestures and symbols slipping past their referents. The Japanese brand of
capitalism immediately eludes any form it is assumed to take. One only glimpses the shadowy
shape of it, floating over the edge of the Pacific, a center-less and self-carnivorous entity.
As van Wolferen demonstrates, “Japan Inc.” served as a convenient imaginary space onto
which one could project the ills of late capitalism, or any critical discourse proposing that
meaning is rapidly vanishing from modern life, or any host of talking points involving nostalgia
for a more “human” way of life. The apocalyptic language used to describe Japanese capitalism
masks anxieties about globalization and the impact of a true open market in which the entire
world participates democratically. The same group of writers who once argued for free trade in
the face of Communism find themselves creating a new foible, against which an exceptional
American capitalism might re-assert itself, even violently. An unleashed globalization in the
1980s, fully realized, was immediately in danger of losing the particulars of the American model.
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In turn, what remains for van Wolferen as well as fictional narrators such as Masterton is the last
hope that perhaps American values, the soul missing from an evil Japanese capitalism, will urge
American citizens to rescue the world from the very tenets of a free market into which many had
invested everything.
Signs of this fear date back as far as the late 1960s, when anxiety toward the Japanese
“miracle” first entered popular circulation. In Roman Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby (1968),
this “miracle” of Japanese economic growth originates in the seed-bed of chaos, Satan’s den.
This horror film tells the story of Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse, an aspiring actor and his
beautiful wife, as they attempt to climb the rungs of higher society in New York City. In the
early stages of the film, Guy (John Cassavetes) appears in a commercial for the Japanese
company Yamaha, peddling motorcycles. He is clearly linked to the Japanese corporation he is
asked to represent. The shared motivation between Japan’s upstart economy and Guy’s career
aspirations are laid out for the spectator by Polanski: pursuit of the almighty dollar, at any cost.
Guy even allows Roman, the disciple of the Devil, to blind another man in order to then take his
part in a play. Yamaha, in turn, runs advertisements during the Pope’s visit to Shea stadium,
depicted as a gratuitously commercial event. Guy, referring to himself as “Mr. Yamaha” on
several occasions over the course of the film, symbolically aligns with “Japan” as both sell their
soul for immediate material success.
The figurative tie between the Japanese economy and Guy runs even deeper than shared
financial aspirations. In the closing scene, a stereotypical Japanese salaryman emerges,
consulting with Roman in the corner of the room. Importantly, his presence has gone
unrecognized in the rest of the film, invisible in all preceding shots of the coven. The assertion
by “Japan bashers” that Japanese capitalism is a “quiet, intangible, silent” force is re-affirmed by
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the mute figure (his only words the obedient declaration: “Hail Satan!”). Capitalism is revealed
to be a mere cover-up. Shallow greed is not a result of a “good old boys” social network, as it
initially appears to be, but is symptomatic of something far more sinister. Rosemary’s belief a
corrupt outside force will claim her baby neglects an unnerving reality, one in which late
capitalism is not a creation of man that has grown out of his control and can be “re-tamed”;
rather, it is an offspring bestowed upon him by a genuinely demonic power. Guy and the
Japanese salaryman cannot help but serve the whims of a deterministic force far more occult than
economic.
Still, Polanski is clearly condemning capitalism in its entirety, revealing the deviant side
of any form it might take, as opposed to “bashers” such as van Wolferen, who rely on
distinguishing Japanese capitalism and its enigmatic essence. Thus “Japan” as feared Other
oscillates with “Japan” as feared Same. In Rosemary’s Baby, the Japanese figure unveils his lack
of meaning or purpose with the simple act of taking pictures on a camera without film.

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The

rituals of Roman and Guy are all aimed at the common purpose of literally conceiving of Satan’s
child as the corruption of innocence. In contrast, the ritual of this particular Japanese figure
mirrors that of Rosemary herself (Mia Farrow) at the closing of the film. In other words, they
each enter into the discourse of the coven with purely theatrical roles, signifying nothing but the
gesture itself.
As early as 1968, “Japan Inc.” blurs with “America Inc.,” expressing itself through
postmodern gesticulations without a core meaning. Rosemary, after violently resisting the wishes
of the coven, eventually submits to being the demon child’s mother, her final service the rocking
of the cradle while she stares off into nowhere. She knows now, of course, her baby is the spawn
of Satan and her actions merely perpetuate “the System.” Nevertheless, she continues to go
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through superficial motions, merging with a “System” whose “overriding, sacrosanct aim,” like
that of van Wolferen’s Japanese capitalism, is “its own survival.” By the same token, the
Japanese figure, who opens the scene by absent-mindedly grinning and showing Rosemary his
camera is without film, concludes the scene by busily snapping away, complacent in an equally
superficial “System.” The gesture rings hollow, without any intent or potential, without film to
justify it as recording any actual event; playing upon the crude caricature of Japanese tourists, his
goal cannot even be read, in stereotypical fashion, as a sinister acquisition of information
concerning American industry. The salaryman and Rosemary transform into pure excess, the
senseless movements echoed back and forth between Rosemary rocking the cradle and the
“miracle” Japanese economy eagerly taking meaningless photographs evoke a dreadful sense of
inescapability in both, posing for and taking pictures that could never develop. As will be
discussed later in the chapter, theorist Roland Barthes - much like Polanski – locates a realm of
pure gesture in an imaginary “Japan”: “It is the flash of a photograph one takes very carefully (in
the Japanese manner) but having neglected to load the camera with film” (Barthes, 83). This
terrifying post-dialectic is made manifest in encounters with “Japan Inc.”
Degree of Difference: A Binary Broken Down
The distinction between “Japan Inc.” as feared Other and “Japan Inc.” as feared Same can
be further elaborated through comparisons between depictions of America’s economic system
and Japanese capitalism, comparisons readily slipping into details not of a degree of kind (Us vs.
the supernatural Them) but of a degree of difference. Japanese modern society, in the aspects it
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shares with America, has long been read with such a “degree of difference.”

In one example,

Hearn, the (in)famous romancer of Japanese culture dealt with at some length in this dissertation,
commented as early as the 1890s: “In all forms of society these three kinds of pressure are
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exerted to some degree; but in Japanese society, owing to inherited tendency, and traditional
sentiment, their power is tremendous” (Hearn 1997, 232 emphasis mine).

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Later definitions of

Japanese capitalism are often not prototypical polarities, such as those found in Cold War
discourse; instead, reactionary Orientalist fantasies are dependent on excess as their sole
characteristic, the sole matter distinguishing them at all.

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Van Wolferen comments upon “common human traits” between the United States and
Japan but distinguishes these as containing “an overwhelming difference of degree” (van
Wolferen, 329). In one case, he suggests that “Jinmyaku (webs of influence) are much more
widespread, and of incomparably greater importance, than old-boy networks of the West” (van
Wolferen, 110). The focus is not on the opposition of the practice but on its severity. Van
Wolferen, in this attempt to navigate such narrow rhetorical spaces, ends up emphasizing a
degree of difference to such an extent one loses sight of the fact that the anxieties he is raising
are aimed at nothing short of the tenets of late capitalism. Van Wolferen provides the following
assessment of “the System”:
The competition among salaryman families to stock their small homes with the latestmodel refrigerator, air-conditioners and stereo-sound colour television and a vast array of
electrical labour-saving devices, and their tiny parking places with cars, was exactly what
was needed to keep many of their firms running at full capacity. (161)
This language is reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis’s satirical views of main street America. Why,
one must enquire, would someone espousing American capitalism attack so bitterly the
fundamental principles of the capitalist project? The entire critique hinges on the concept of
excess alone, that “Japan Inc.” is a version of capitalism gone too far, too extreme, having lost
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sight of its referent. In short, it has taken the logic of capitalism to its logical conclusion. As a
final example, van Wolferen writes: “(In Japan) popular ‘stars’ are mass-produced: with
‘careers’ rarely lasting more than two years, they are a caricature of the western phenomenon of
entertainers famous merely for their fame” (177). Consequently, although American capitalism
has its short-comings for van Wolferen – celebrities famous merely for their fame – Japanese
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capitalism is magnified into epic/enigmatic proportions, a caricature of a caricature.

“Japan

Inc.” as a result provides one of the first truly postmodern monsters in American discourse.
This phenomenon arises in a variety of fiction from this period, including Michael
Crichton’s best-selling novel Rising Sun (1992). Crichton acknowledges his reliance on van
Wolferen in the afterword of the text and one quickly spots his influence. The murder of a young
American woman has occurred at a Japanese corporation. Peter, a detective, acquires a security
tape of the occurrence, the only signifier “capturing” the event. This videotape affords the focal
point of the entire narrative. It is played countless times, rewound, copied, manipulated, and
forged. Its unreliable images lead Peter down several dead ends. The Japanese villain is made
into a floating signifier, a blur on celluloid. Whoever committed the crime seems to exist in
another realm, hidden in the celluloid layers comprising the replication of this event. “Japan
Inc.” transforms quite literally into a simulacra, Japanese control of the VCR industry allowing
for the perpetuation of this virtual world. In juxtaposition, the reader of Rising Sun constantly
returns to the parallel superficiality of American culture. When referring to his ex-wife, Peter
notes: “She didn’t have any core, any real substance. She was like a television set: she just
played the latest show” (Crichton, 98). “Japan Inc.” and “America Inc.” merge within the
artificial chambers of Hollywood.

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Nonetheless, as with van Wolferen and other “bashers,” this surface-level realm
ultimately yields to a restored sense that the threat posed by “the System” does, in fact, exist. The
narrator watches the “authentic” version of the murder tape at the climax of the novel:
And in the glass of the conference room, we saw the shape of a man. He walked forward,
appearing from the right. He entered the room, looking back once to make sure he was
alone. It was Ishiguro. Very deliberately, he walked to the edge of the table, placed his
hands on the girl’s neck, and strangled her. (373)
Crichton restores what the novel once threatens to abolish: the face of the monster, a Japanese
Other, a well-defined image for Us to fear. This familiar Other, harkening back to paradigms
from the Cold War, alleviates the far more daunting chaos of simulation, prompting Peter to take
better care of his daughter (as well as his country). For the majority of the novel, though, what
defines “Japan Inc.” for Crichton is its slippery identity, an identity based on detachment from
rules governing reality, a virtual existence driving the mystery forward.
“Japan” as a feared Other, used by various popular economists as well as Crichton, draws
attention to a silver-lining in the presupposition that American capitalism is decidedly not based
on excess. If Americans act quickly, they argue, restoring the values of a nostalgic American
economy (which, of course, never existed), then the invasive economic mutation will be diverted.
But heavily constructed nostalgia regularly slips into the excess it is designed to hide, the “tinny
laughter” of American culture, revealing a System based on a surfeit of superficial dreams – or,
more appropriately, nightmares. In the so-called New World Order, reality can only be found in
the realm of the virtual: the lack of film in Rosemary’s Baby passes into a surplus of celluloid in

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Crichton’s novel. Both texts reveal an imagined New World Order where the bond between
human beings and their textual representation grows increasingly unrecognizable.
At this transitional moment, anxiety reverses its outward course and recognizes the
horrors of a global capitalism that has risen to absolute power, only to lurch back upon its creator
as a Frankenstein for the new millennium. In these works, late capitalism returns to haunt its
champion, to disturb Fukuyama’s idealized “End of History.” Baudrillard’s book, The
Transparency of Evil, elaborates on this theme. It was translated and made available for
American readers in 1993, the apex of these economic fears towards Japan. The work concludes
by describing Japan’s “radical Otherness,” its de-humanized essence, in one-dimensional ways
analogous to the narratives examined until this point. He articulates his version of an imaginary
“Japan Inc.”: “This cold and painstaking efficiency… is an enigma and indeed unintelligible
form… a cannibalistic form – assimilating, absorbing, aping, devouring” (Baudrillard 1993, 1634). The key distinction to consider is that Baudrillard remains well-aware of the fact this
Othering process is inherently fantastic, the product of a hyper-simulated cultural apparatus.
Directly linking the popular motif of the virus at that time – primarily, AIDS and cancer – to the
popular imagery of “Japan Inc.,” Baudrillard orbits these concepts around a late capitalism
“curing” itself of any genuine fear of the Other:
Our society is entirely dedicated to neutrailizing otherness, to destroying the other as a
natural point of reference in a vast flood of aseptic communication and interaction, of
illusory exchange and contact. By dint of communication, our society develops an allergy
to itself… an allergy to its own shadow. Otherness denied becomes a spectre and returns
in the form of a self-destructive process. This, too, is the transparency of Evil. (139)

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Torn between fear of the Other, a tendency to batten down the hatches amidst economic
nationalists, and fear of the Same (a lingering suspicion that the demon is always-already within
our collective homes), American audiences can glimpse an Other whose articulation is alwaysalready excessive. To quote a well-worn passage from Adorno and Horkheimer: “The perfected
similarity is the absolute difference” (Horkheimer, 116). This crucial turn brings one to the
wildly successful film Gremlins, a film deconstructing the supernatural terms with which the
Japanese “miracle” habitually exposes a “System” with nothing left to haunt but itself.
Gremlins and “America Inc.”
Dante’s Gremlins displays what happens when a small American town is introduced toa
cute Magwai named Gizmo, an invasive entity imagined from the Far East. At first, the Peltzer
family is smitten with the adorable creature, welcoming it into their quiet suburban home with
open arms. Yet the Magwai quickly breeds, transforming into a grotesque, reptilian version of its
former self and threatening to tear the town apart. Dante’s incredibly popular film goes on to
revise this standard myth of Outsiders plaguing an innocent town, addressing the larger trouble
of representing monsters moving into a post-Cold War era.
Initially, the film seems to follow van Wolferen’s formulaic, one-dimensional Orientalist
fantasy. Dante proclaims Gizmo’s “Asianness” in the first scene, opening in a caricature of
Chinatown. Ran Peltzer, a self-proclaimed “inventor,” visits a cluttered shop to find a gift for his
son, Billy. He encounters a wise sage dressed in stereotypical Asian garb, sharing fortune cookie
sophistry. In crude, broken English, the sage warns: “With Magwai comes great responsibility.”
Not overly moved by this warning, Ran decides to import the old man’s most prized product,

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Gizmo, transporting him from the imaginary world of Chinatown into the equally imaginary
suburb of Kingstown Falls, U.S.A.
The import of an Asian product into a small American town, and the reactionary terror
that follows, takes its basis from the very real Orientalist hysteria that took place in the 1980s.
Gizmo and the gremlins are stereotypes of Japanese capitalism, portrayed with an innate ability
to mimic and a “miraculous,” awe-inspiring propensity for spreading in the dark secrecy of night.
Gizmo mimics the tune of Billy’s keyboard and blinks to copy Billy’s friend; Spike and his gang
delight in the empty-headed mimicry of Disney’s Seven Dwarfs call: “Hi – Ho!” The town’s
local drunk Larry, paranoid about an invasion, targets the electronics industry, telling Billy that
“gremlins” are likely to be found hiding in “the radio you stick in your ears” (Sony Walkman, a
product heavily imported from Japan). Later, in his disgust at his malfunctioning TV, Larry
laments: “We should have gotten a Zenith.” This alludes to the well-publicized legal dispute
between Zenith and Matsushita, in which Zenith representatives claimed Matsushita was
practicing “predatory pricing” and was engaged in a massive “conspiracy” against the U.S.
television industry. Indeed, gremlins appear at the end of the film having taken over the
television sets at the shopping mall, their faces on every screen, laughing maniacally. As this
occurs, the camera briefly pans to an unusual vinyl on a sales rack entitled “Figure Control
Through Asian Neurothaianetic Self Hypnotism.” This record, released by notorious hypnotist
“Dr. Dante,” re-enforces that this film focuses on an elaborate attempt to occupy the minds of
Americans. The tongue, however, is never far from cheek in Gremlins and “Dr. Dante,” a welldocumented fraud, perhaps stands in for director Joe Dante, positing that all of this fear is
initiated by little more than commercial fantasy. Not unlike Baudrillard, Dante points out, with
this relatively minor detail, the film’s exploitative quality and its “legitimacy” as an object of
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horror, a realization also applicable to the tenets of “Japan bashing” in American discourse. I
therefore argue Gremlins is a monster movie exposing the emptiness behind the paradigm of
Other and Self in which the question of who to blame for the resultant carnage (Us or Them) is
profoundly unsettled.
Echoing the blatantly unbelievable mythos of an appalling Japanese invasion, American
capitalism, embodied in the film’s Norman Rockwell-themed Christmas season, is equally
artificial. The local nemesis, Mrs Diegler, whose only purpose remains “to make money,”
provides a cartoonish manifestation of capitalist greed, accompanied in her strolls by
exaggerated circus music. In various other scenes, one witnesses American machinery, social
and technological, as laughably inefficient. This is accompanied by the hackneyed sales pitch of
Ran Peltzer, peddling his useless wares. Elsewhere, ridiculous protectionist Larry’s demise
comes at the hand of his beloved, American-made Kentucky Harvester, driven now by the
mischievous gremlins. This moment registers as unnerving for Larry as it becomes clear
gremlins do not limit themselves to a national affiliation (as he assumes all along). Larry’s
moment of alarm does not come when he sees the monsters infiltrating his world; instead, his
shock comes at the moment he sees the gremlins for what they truly are: ubiquitous, undermining
even the tools assumed to be on the side of an agrarian American ethic embodied by his
American-made Harvester.
The demons of capitalism feast without prejudice, thus inquiring into the necessity of
designating them as belonging to a particular culture. After all, Dante’s images of innocent
small-town United States are always-already absurd and always-already infected by late
capitalism; one need look no further than the prominence of chain stores such as Allstate
Insurance and Burger King on the Main Street of Kingston Falls. Baudrillard describes the
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triumph of the arrival of the New World Order and the subsequent dissolution of Others – at least,
authentic Others based on degree of kind – as a tremendously destabilizing event: “We see
emerging here all that we are, all the allegedly universal emblems of the human in a kind of ideal
hallucination and return of the repressed, including the worst, corniest, most banal things in
Western ‘culture’” (Baudrillard1992, 21). The gremlins, another example of the viral motif,
return to feast on a society which has unwittingly, in its quest for immunity from the Communist
plague, opened itself to the far more debilitating disease, the breakdown of the binary between
Us and the monster.
An eclectic mixture of mimicry and propensity for extraordinary growth (“Japan Inc.”)
with recklessness and lack of ethics (“America Inc.”) breeds the gremlins as a composite of
media-fed stereotypes. In the end, the film turns back on itself, a product of the late capitalism it
appears at first to be criticizing. Dante’s revised formula does not advocate, through familiar
dialectics, the improvement of capitalism, as most horror films during the Cold War attempt to
do. Contrastingly, the surpluses of “Japan Inc.” come up against the excessive capitalism of
1950s America, haunting everything - and therefore, nothing at all. A caricature of a caricature,
competing stereotypes of “Japan Inc.” linked to competing stereotypes of “America Inc.” What
exactly, if anything, is the audience supposed to be afraid of in Gremlins?
Roland Barthes and the Postmodern Monster
Gremlins can be read, I argue, in direct conversation with Roland Barthes’ Empire of
Signs. The two texts speak to a cultural moment in which imagining “Japan Inc.” initiates a
forum for discussing the cultural formulations of a New World Order. Theorist Peter Trifonas,
in his analysis of Empire of Signs, contends that the goal of Barthes’ most controversial work is

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“the possibility for a reassessment of historical methodology in relation to questions of culture
and its representation after semiotics” (Trifonas 2001, 51 emphasis mine). “Japan,” a fantasy
fully acknowledged by Barthes as existing only in his mind, opens the possibility of selfrecognition in the Western practice of depicting Others (and, ultimately, understanding itself).
This poststructuralist shift is two-pronged in its approach: first, to recognize the groundless
existence of “Japan” as a text without a core, pure illusion, pure text; second, to reveal the
correspondingly groundless status of the observer who once claimed an ability to “read” other
cultures, accessing their hidden Truth. Barthes famously declares at the opening of the work:
If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively
as a novelistic object… I can also – though in no way claiming to represent or to analyze
reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse) – isolate somewhere in
the world (faraway) a certain number of features (a term employed in linguistics), and out
of these features deliberately form a system. (Barthes, 3)
This “System,” composed by Barthes, is not an isolated phenomenon. In actuality, he seems to
posit, Western discourse has been articulating “Japan” in this fashion since the earliest
encounters and continues to do so, even unconsciously in works such as those by van Wolferen.
All is myth, Barthes reports, all is fantasy. The only distinction remains an untenable degree of
difference. To prove the post-structuralist essence of the form itself, and the ambitions of its
author, Barthes breaks down the binary of “East/West,” which he views as containing the last
vestiges of Self and Other and the final traces of modern monstrosity.

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Barthes, unlike van Wolferen, discerns that a degree of difference is not enough to sustain
the time-worn binary of “East/West.” In contrast, this suggests a crack, a slippage into the
ungraspable concept of excess. He states:
Today there are doubtless a thousand things to learn about the Orient: an enormous labor
of knowledge is and will be necessary (its delay can only be the result of an ideological
occultation); but it is also necessary that, leaving aside vast regions of darkness (capitalist
Japan, American acculturation, technological development), a slender thread of light
search out not other symbols but the very fissure of the symbolic. (4, emphasis mine)
The symbolic “System” is reflected back on itself in the encounter with “Japan Inc.”; at this
moment, at the precipice of late capitalism’s triumph over all takers, Western binaries are
potentially upset. The fissure between political bodies, between Word and Meaning, traces a
fragile mark. Baudrillard adds, “Capitalism has cannibalized all negativity… it has
unceremoniously devoured the dialectic by parodistically taking the opposing terms upon itself,
by parodistically going beyond its own contradictions” (Baudrillard 1992, 52). As an example,
the gremlins, puppets for the amusement of film-goers, at the end of the film start to play with
their own puppets, amusing themselves while the audience sits idly by. At another point, the
monsters hide among stuffed animals, merchandise already indistinguishable from the object
they are supposedly selling (Gremlins the film). Barthes’ vision reverberates in Gremlins
deconstruction of “East/West,” “Us/Monster.”
At stake in the intersection of these texts (popular economics, post-structuralist theory,
Gremlins and fictional depictions of “Japan”) is a provocative movement away from Cold War
discursive paradigms. Perhaps, Dante seems to suggest, there are no longer alternatives to a

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capitalist way of life. The hyper-real remainders fulfill what Ran has touted all along, but in
ways far more disquieting than he could have ever imagined: “Fantastic ideas for a fantastic
world.” Ran’s project undoubtedly failed to consider the ramifications of a glut of fantasy. Thus,
in the end, the comparison between Japanese capitalism and American capitalism signifies
nothing but exaggeration. It is banter, words for their own sake, pure repetition, the recycling of
staged “American values.” Gremlins, masquerading as a formulaic horror film, projects these
anxieties onto the big screen.
Jeffrey Cohen, in his Monster Theory, asks, “Do monsters really exist? Surely they must,
for if they did not, how could we?” (Cohen 1996: 20). This explains in some ways van
Wolferen’s grasping, and the grasping of most “bashers,” for “Japan Inc.” as a feared Other. To
reconstitute “Japan” as outside of the natural might reassure audiences there are still things
hiding under the bed and that one must remain vigilant. We have explored a number of figures in
previous chapters who try to institute similar reassurances. This attempts to re-constitute the
dialectic, swerving around a highly-anticipated “end of history,” and accomplish the second
segment of Ran’s personal motto: “I make the illogical logical.” This kind of model fits neatly
within the horror genre and its emphasis on a degree of kind. The horror film in particular
ritualizes this process, transforming it into an easily digestible form: “the monster is difference
made flesh… dialectical Other” (Cohen 1996, 7). The innocent subject encounters what exists
beyond itself, is terrified by its myriad of possibilities, and thus returns to itself a more fully
developed subject (the surface-level formula of Tengu and Rising Sun, among countless others).
However, as Cohen acknowledges, “the monster exists only to be read” (4). The frightening
potential beneath this statement is that the monster might one day cease to mean anything. And
so, when the act of reading ceases to offer any symbolic beyond, when Barthes succeeds in
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disassembling the “East/West” dynamic, so too might all monstrous Others cease to exist. And,
in turn, how can we?

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Gremlins, at its center, markets itself not as a traditional monster film but as a cartoon,
inseparable from the cartoons drawn by its protagonist Billy, himself a caricature of the boy next
door (Larry’s Lil’ Abner, endlessly returning). The film provides countless overly-determined
stereotypes; the layers reveal not a critique of capitalism but instead empty signifiers ad nauseum.
During one scene in a movie theatre, the gremlins transform into shadows on the screen, echoing
the diminutive cartoon images they had been watching (Disney’s Seven Dwarves). The line
between reality and the movie they watch is compromised as they rip their way through the
screen. All is fantasy. While horror films are traditionally based on dichotomies, Gremlins is
based on absolute pastiche. As Cohen argues, most contemporary horror films depend on the
knowable at odds with the “Unknown”; though the two blur, the blurring is only meaningful if
one first grasps their initial distinctions (e.g., the doll that comes to life is horrifying because one
also, at some level, expects it to be lifeless). Pastiche, in contrast, relies on a degree of difference,
on the gross exaggeration of a subject’s characteristics (a mother using household appliances not
to prepare the evening meal but to slaughter invaders in her home). The movement in Western
discourse concerning Japan toward the degree of difference thus coincides with a shift in the
horror genre toward horror-parody, developed further in later films such as Wes Craven’s
Scream (1996). Gremlins embraces campiness, comical inflation aimed not at genuine anxiety
but toward feel-good consumption. “Japan Inc.” and “America Inc.” are conflated as postmodern
monsters which are, of course, not really monsters at all, but always-already merchandise.
The idealistic hope, as Trifonas comments regarding Barthes, is that “such a critical move
would suspend the need to locate Japan in opposition to Western culture” (Trifonas 2001: 49).
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According to Trifonas, analyzing the excesses employed to depict Japanese capitalism allows for
recognition in the audience of the paralyzing sameness late capitalism has induced across
national boundaries.

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Theorist Marc Guilluame interprets a phenomenon similar to the “Gizmo

effect” with a degree of optimism. Postmodern monstrosity as articulated in encounters with
“Japan,” according to Guilluame, de-stabilizes in a constructive fashion, allowing one to imagine
a model “truly in a relationship of alterity with us,” moving past older paradigms of Otherness
and toward a paradigm inherently aware of its inherent limitations (Guilluame 2008, 50). One’s
encounter with Gizmo allows one, in short, to consider a horror genre without traditional
monsters: “If we know how to interpret this fascination (with Japanese alterity), we might
discover the hopes and anxieties of our civilization” (50, emphasis mine). While the viewer
might remain fearful of the exaggerated politics Gizmo submits, what Guillaume deems Japan’s
“artificial strangeness,” the corny, contrived voice-over ending the film (“So if your air
conditioner goes on the fritz or your washing machine blows up or your video recorder conks
out; before you call the repairman, turn on all the lights, check all the closets and cupboards, look
under all the beds, 'cause you never can tell -there just might be a gremlin in your house”)
reminds the viewer that she might not fall for the ruse this time, transcending binaries embedded
in formulaic fear via Hollywood. Simultaneously, she can imagine – however briefly – an
apolitical world taken form in the shadows beyond it, a world where Gremlins serves as a radical
alternative for representing cultural difference in the horror genre writ large.

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A Communal Haunt
Spatial and Temporal Ruptures in the Horror Films of Shimizu Takashi

The fantastic, as an object and even mode of discourse, was closely affiliated with the
instantiation of modernity in Japan, and that it has been mobilized to assert a
mysteriousness if not exclusivity for modern Japan ever since… such a discourse might
have shaped other modernities as well, which have gone unrecognized without the
defamiliarization of modernity that an examination of Japan’s case performs. (Figal, 222)
The fantastic is a long-held a “mode of discourse” in Japan. Japanese cinema, especially
the horror films of the late twentieth century, bursts with spectral entities. In contrast,
mainstream American horror cinema has rarely dealt with ghostliness in the same rigorous and
self-identifying fashion. Consider, as one example, the ghostly presence in the recent
Paranormal Activity series (2007 – 2011); the realm of supernatural entity and the physical space
of the film are clearly at odds, rather than calling into doubt the stability of the character’s
subjectivity. In order to understand modernity on a global scale, one might examine how the
recent cultural exchange of Japanese horror films (also known as “J-Horror”) and their
subsequent Hollywood re-makes represent a defamiliarization of modernity for Japanese
audiences and yet another layer of repression for the American viewership. This chapter will
survey how containment of national identity in Japanese popular cinema frequently features
ghostly forces that demonstrate the vacuous nature beneath its surface. Recently, Hollywood has
navigated around these anxieties, one might say “re-repressed” them, by inserting an authentic
origin at the heart of the haunting. I will argue that these specific alterations uncover a shared
cultural anxiety between the U.S. and Japan: the fear that beneath all of the ostentatious displays

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of modernity, there resides an empty lacuna. As bubbles burst and economic hegemony seems to
fade for the U.S. in the years following the 2008 collapse, these Japanese horror films offer a
method for American audiences to encounter consistently the postmodern specters initially
hinted at by Dante’s Gremlins (see previous chapter).
To begin, one must briefly overview the importance of phantasms in Japanese cultural
history. By doing so, one begins to recognize a pattern of expressing the uncanny unique to
Japanese discourse. I will then address how J-Horror has been re-made in the U.S. and why the
Japanese method for representing the uncanny (unlike, say, the method used by Spanish director
Guillermo Del Toro in popular releases such as Pan’s Labyrinth and The Orphanage) is
routinely revised for audiences in the U.S. Finally, I will turn to the future and why I believe this
exchange will continue to influence how Americans deal with repressed anxieties concerning
modernity in the years ahead.
Shimizu Takashi, a thirty-nine year old director who once studied under auteur Kurosawa
Kiyoshi, provides an ideal series of cinematic texts for undertaking this critical endeavor. His
films specifically deconstruct one’s understanding of space and time, urging spectators to
interrogate various presumed cultural truths adopted from Western thought. In addition, Shimizu
has directed films for both Japanese and American audiences. His active interest in
correspondences between the two cultures therefore allows one to tease out broader implications
for the horror genre as a transnational phenomenon.
Ghostly Discourse, Japanese Identity
Ghosts are one of the most prominent tropes in Japanese cinema due to the fact that what
is “dead” in the modern era for the archipelago returns not as a didactic reminder or a

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hypocritical impulse to be purged, as in American horror cinema, but instead returns as echoes of
a transient selfhood forever eluding the stasis of frames. Japanese film of the late twentieth
century, particularly the recent wave of internationally popular horror films, does not attempt to
seal off uncertainty; it was against this uncertainty Japanese constructs of modernity were
formed, and return perpetually to thrive.
Japanese modernity shows heavy influence from international forces, such as MacArthur
and the Occupation’s “assistance” in a new post-war Japanese constitution, as well as domestic
parties. Within Japan, there was a movement to demonstrate Japanese modernity would not be
controlled by fushigi (folk beliefs). The State initiated the shift towards a larger role in the global
community and, consequently, the government launched a regimented attempt at dispelling
opinions in the international arena that Japan was “primitive” or “backwards.” As one example,
Inoue, a scientist and philosopher at the turn of the century, instigated an extensive project to
create taxonomy of the supernatural. The purpose was clearly to marginalize local superstitions,
to trivialize them in order to create a more “rational” identity for the nation. He labeled the socalled monsters “subjective errors of the human mind” (Figal, 51). Inoue insisted that “Japan”
required cohesiveness as a Nation-state, an agreement it had lacked throughout much of its
history.
Reaction against this sort of repression via modernization was immediate, reminding us
of issues raised in the first chapter of this dissertation: Yanagita, the proclaimed “father of native
ethnology” in Japan, composed the stylized Tales of Tono (1912) with an openness refusing to
treat the supernatural as science alone. Figal writes: “The path that (Yanagita’s) folk studies
would take led not to an ‘elimination [of unreal objects] by paraphrase’ via an ideological
application of Western scientific and medical knowledge, but rather toward the construction of
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an alternative type of knowledge of ‘the Japanese’ via a passage through the poetic” (117).
Yanagita’s work embodies the “breaks” and “discontinuities” the Japanese supernatural offer,
defying any imposed frames.
The Tales of Tono thus activated a poetic discussion of ghostly forces which has
continued into the present. Previously, ghostly tales were used to teach lessons to the young.
William Elliot Griffis embraced this antiquated style when he imported select supernatural tales
to America in the early twentieth century (see introduction). However, the emergence of
modernity as an ever-conflicted anchor for national identity altered the meaning of the ghost
story in significant ways; writers such as Yanagita and later Izumi Kyoka place the fantastic at
the very center of Japanese selfhood, making the claim that Japan could be recognized only in
accordance to its fleeting, spectral nature. This recognition, ushered in by the rapid
modernization of the Taisho and Showa periods, is a foundation upon which much of Japanese
cinema was built.
The fantastic allows the modern to be thought. In a sense, modernity itself is
phantasmagoric; it ceaselessly generates that which is a la mode by consciously
imagining difference from things past. Embodying transformation, a change of modes,
modernity is akin to the root definition of bakemono, a thing that changes form. (Figal,
14)
The insecure grounding of modernity manifested itself in the flickering shadows of Japanese
theatres. The images on screen of “tradition” and “cohesion” produce for the spectator
recognition that what is being framed always straddles the border between life and death, “real”
and “illusory.”

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Marilyn Ivy’s Discourse of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan expands this
concept of modernity and phantasm in Japan, arguing the State project of creating a “whole”
Japanese identity – a visible kokutai, or “National essence” – hinges upon these uncanny
sensations:
Despite (Japan’s) labors to recover the past and deny the losses of “tradition,” modernist
nostalgia must preserve, in many senses, the sense of absence that motivates its desire…
(The Japanese) thematize loss in a variety of ways as they work inevitably to recover that
loss. That work sometimes takes the guise of mourning, sometimes of recursive repetition,
sometimes of rememoration or memorialization. And it also appears in the mode of
forgetting, through moments of fetishistic disavowal. (Ivy, 10 – 13)
The work done by the spectator, the pursuit of the phantoms on screen, is the pursuit of a “lost”
tradition that must be absent in order for the audience to strive continuously towards satisfaction.
“Ghosts” are then essential to modernity as the Japanese subject must chase them endlessly,
working towards reunion with an artificial past, forced to suspend the knowledge that what they
pursue is not “real” - nor can it ever be.
Ivy labels this process “vanishing,” defining the concept as follows: “what (dis)embodies
in its gerund from the movement of something passing away, gone but not quite, suspended
between presence and absence, located at a point that both is and is not here in the repetitive
process of absenting… their status is often ghostly” (Ivy, 20). The cinematic medium is built
upon constant vanishing, where fantastic dissolves consistently disrupt the bucolic harmony of
solid shapes. This “vanishing” can be read as yet another symptom of modernity in Japanese

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culture, recognition of the transience at work in any reification of the Nation as a discursive
space.
A primary example of the intersection between phantasm and modernity can be located in
Kenji Mizoguchi’s classic 1953 film Ugetsu, one of the first films, importantly, to gain
international recognition at foreign film festivals. Husband Genjuro, obsessed with material
wealth and fame, is lured into a strange woman’s home, where he believes himself to have found
fulfillment. This temptress figure is evident throughout Japanese mythology but is now also
linked directly to the hopeless drive of capitalism. Meanwhile, his wife Miyagi, deserted, is
senselessly killed by soldiers. The film grows even further complicated when Genjuro breaks
free to return home, where he happily finds Miyagi doing her “traditional” chores. The camera,
upon his return, tracks him through an empty home. After a slow pan, it rests on the romantic
image of Miyagi at work, where the audience once saw nothing at all. With this visual
uncertainty, “tradition” appears as ghostly in Ugetsu. The images are not mere figments of
Genjuro’s imagination; long after he has left, the camera focuses upon Miyagi, folding clothes
and completing domestic services. “Tradition,” like the temptress, is found by Mizoguchi to be
as fantastic as the imposed dreams of modernization. The audience gradually comes to question
which “Ghosts” or “Spirits” they can believe in: those that have been - or those yet to be. Both
are fictional byproducts of cinema and the State.
H.D. Harootunian, echoing Ivy, articulates this as an “uneven” process. He describes the
State project of overcoming modernity as one attempting to “freeze-dry the moment of cultural
unevenness,” seeing it as an attempt to “stave off death” (Harootunian, 316). All of this stems
from an unsettled relationship to the past, to the “origins” of modern Japan. Harootunian views
Japanese discourse as:
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An encounter with the realm of the uncanny: the same but yet the not-same, the past that
was still present, the modern and its other… the precinct of the uncanny where modern
Japan confronts its double, where the present encounters a past that in all respects is
similar but is now out of time. In modern society this is precisely how the appeal to
memory works against the claims of history. (321, emphasis mine)
Japanese cinema traverses the border between memory and History by asking society to
remember something visually it never could.
Pervasive ghostliness therefore reminds one of habitual, cyclical loss. As one comes to
believe they have grasped static constructs of Nation and History, and they have seen kokutai
manifested as cinematic image, these visions vaporize into thin air. The camera shifts and the
spectator is no longer certain of their position in relation to the cinematic space. The casings of
ghost films such as Ugetsu and Otoshiana are consistently violated and found to be inadequate an essential precedent to the later works of Shimizu Takashi.
The Shadow Self in a “Lost Decade”
The fantastic in Japanese cinema re-appears prominently with the turn of the twenty-first
century surge in horror films by directors such as Shimizu. His films illuminate a number of
contemporary concerns, including the hyper-techologization of everyday existence and the
economic bubble burst of the 1980s. The value of the Nation was once more called into question
forcefully at the time of Shimizu’s rise in popularity. Valdine Clemens in her The Return of the
Repressed, writes:
A “national brand” of Gothic fiction seems to proliferate whenever the political and
economic dominance that a given country has acquired appears to be passing its peak and
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about to decline… when reevaluation of the national identity seems to take on a particular
urgency. (Clemens, 5)
In the 1980s the economy that was impossible to sink, sank; the Japanese economic surge and
apparent dominance, after a provocative decade of investment in American real estate, started to
slow drastically. There was apparently a ceiling to Japanese growth and a number of deficiencies
were revealed: pressure by foreign countries for Japan to pay and maintain a military,
unsatisfactory living conditions (overcrowding), an uneven distribution of wealth, among others.
This slow-down was accompanied by popular self-diagnosis. Some probed how much of the
bubble should be blamed on of Japan’s out-of-control Westernization. The inquiry became ever
more prevalent – what would it come to mean, moving ahead, “to be Japanese”?
More recent works influencing Shimizu, Japanese horror films such as Ringu and One
Missed Call – which, significantly, were re-made in America – explore these cultural tensions
through the omnipresent trope of the ghost. The many containers of Japanese society - television
screens, most emphatically - offer portals for the supernatural. Instead of serving as safe places
where “traditional” ideas are manifested, as was almost exclusively the case in the latter half of
the century with State-controlled networks such as NHK, television screens provide dangerously
unstable portals where ghosts travel freely between reality and the imagination. In Japanese
horror films, the televised image is regularly an eerie female specter with long black hair, such as
Sadako in Ringu, who literally crawls out of the screen and into the world of the narrative,
threatening always to go one step further and crawl into the sacred space of the spectator.
What is vital to note is the spectator’s role, in relation to these frames, as detective,
reminiscent of Edogawa Rampo’s tales at the dawn of the century. The televised images are

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unstable, shaky and broken apart, but the spectator is expected to believe they are gaining clarity
as the story of the traumatic past becomes progressively clearer. Miike’s Chakushin Ari (2003,
re-made in America as One Missed Call) expects the viewer, for most of the film, to blame the
abusive mother for the haunting phone calls spreading like a virus. Only at the dénouement does
one realize that they have been fooled and their detective work has been futile. The daughter was
responsible all along – and even this revelation is far from certain. The past is thus forever
elusive, the “origin” of the haunting always just out of reach.
American horror offers its fair share of MacGuffins as well but the difference is that in
America the “origin” is typically assumed to be authentic. American horror films tend to rely
upon a presumed Puritanical repression of “evil” or “deviance,” but the grotesqueries returning
from their unconscious are not manifestations of postmodern uncertainty, as in Japanese film, but
rather manifestations of a corrupt Self situated at a genuine Manichean split. Jason’s mother
transformed into a monstrous state because of the cruel children at the camp, Michael Myers
became monstrous due to of his sexual frustrations, and so forth. In Japanese horror,
contrastingly, trepidation stems from the fact there is no original self. Individual monsters such
as Michael Myers hide no reliable, core “Truth”; modernity, in short, remains spectral at every
turn.
The “monstrous,” as emblematic of the collective, remains situated within a different
paradigm in American horror films than in their Japanese counter-parts. Popular American
culture often privileges individualism against the collective; the freedom of the subject to take on
an oppressive whole is essential to the mythical “American way of life.” Spectators are routinely
supplied with narratives of a singular hero overcoming the demons of society. Look no further
than the Last Girl, such as Halloween’s Laurie, who survives the onslaught of raw sexuality
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because of her purity. Fredric Jameson discusses these detectives in The Geopolitical Aesthetic,
arguing Western filmmakers cannot avoid pitting an individual against a larger system:
The journalist-witness, whatever his professional camaraderie, is alone; the collective
exists on the other side, as his object, in the twin forms of the insurgents and the forces of
order… (in this) sadly and evidently seem to lie in some generalized ideological
incapacity of North Americans to imagine collective processes in the first place, and their
tendency, in consequence, to fall back on the emotional securities of individualizing
narrative paradigms wherever possible. (Jameson 1995, 40 – 41)
The Japanese individual is far less privileged in Japanese horror films; rather, it is collectivity
itself subsuming the narrative. The haunting of society stands ubiquitous. Collective sin cannot
return to threaten the family unit in Japan; what haunts the family is the unsettling notion that it
cannot remember where it came from or what it stands for moving forward.
Shimizu’s Negotiation of National Frames
Contemporary American horror films recurrently address a troubled national past by
returning to site of the initial trauma: the divergence from the City on the Hill promise, issues of
abandonment, abuse, and so forth. In essence, many of these narratives are concerned with the
birth of “evil” and how it can be exorcised from the polity. Recent Japanese horror films,
contrastingly, attempt to address a seemingly fatalistic future by examining the inherent
slipperiness of constructs such as Nationhood. The “Japan” of yesterday and the “Japan” of
tomorrow invade senselessly upon the “Japan” of today. There is rarely a point of solid
identification to locate, only a postmodern surface readily disappearing from sight. The
“monster” cannot be purged due to its very spectral nature. Similar to fissures opened by Dante’s
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Gremlins, the Japanese community in these horror films recognizes that its digitized framing of
National collectivity exceeds its capacity to contain itself. Nowhere is this better exemplified
than in the films of Shimizu, in particular Ju-On (2000) and his hugely popular American remake, The Grudge (2004).
Ju-On concerns a house cursed by a past disturbance, one returning ad nauseum to
“infect” any who enter. This horror manifests itself, perhaps not surprisingly, in a female specter
with long black hair (Kayako) and her ghost son (Toshio), who together proceed to consume all
venturing within their spatial boundaries. The assumed “origin” of the haunting is the murder of
these two figures by a vicious husband who has recently learned Toshio is not his son. The boy
serves, I argue, as an embodiment of modern Japan: he is recognized as “inauthentic,” a creation
without an identifiable cause, vacillating between a Japanese past that cannot be interpreted and
a Japanese future based on little more than repetitive gestures. Toshio reminds one of Barthes’
argument in Empire of Signs as he is yet another symbolic fissure, a domestic element replete of
inherent meaning. To express this endless repetition, Toshio is linked in Ju-On to the phantom of
a black cat. Their once-distinct signification begins to overlap as the film progresses, the boy
ultimately emitting feline shrieks. In one scene, protagonist Rika awakes to a room full of black
cats infesting her home. The uncanny event evokes a trauma transcending spatial borders, over
and over again, spreading into new bodies and new locales.
The terror in Shimizu’s re-make The Grudge disturbs one person; in Ju-On, on the other
hand, it returns an infinite number of times, floating endlessly outside of the house and perilously
close to the realm of the spectator. Shimizu formally marks this realization with a cacophonous
noise akin to feedback. Whenever Rika seems to get close to the “source,” one hears a digital
ringing sound (in Shimizu’s film Marebito [2004], the sound is replaced by static). The output,
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the film itself, moves too close to the “source,” which is – in Ju-On – a horrific revelation
saturating all spatial distinctions. Digitized, the rendering of the collective disrupts itself
repeatedly, emphasizing disjuncture as it violates the artificial boundaries surrounding what it
means, embodied in the unstable household, to be “Japanese.” Shimizu gradually shifts the focus
away from the murder as a catalyst by suggesting there is a far deeper disjointedness, one
ultimately alerting Rika to the tenuousness of her framed identity.
Frames both literal and figurative play a key role in addressing this rupture. In the final
scene, Rika sees in her reflection the reflection of Kayako. At last, when the ghost is revealed, it
is not simply of a supernatural realm but exists everywhere. In Barthean terms, the phantom is
unveiled as pure signification. The edges of the mirror offer only arbitrary delineation.
Television screens likewise allow Shimizu to explore this concept. What has been recorded,
closed off as History, pushes outward into the present, refusing stasis. In juxtaposition, the
American subject arrives back, in the logic of the majority of contemporary horror films, to a
position secure and fully-realized, even when threatened by forces it cannot understand from
outside of itself.

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Psychoanalyst Mladen Dolar argues this moment of understanding the Self as

whole is, in fact, the primary repression. She writes, in her essay “I Shall Be With You on Your
Wedding Night: Lacan and the Uncanny,”: “And it was only in that no-man’s-land that (the
uncanny) could produce anxiety and doom the subject to utter insecurity, to floating without a
point of anchor” (Dolar, 21 emphasis mine). What has been repressed in Shimizu’s Ju-On, and
returns in the form of spectrality, is a situation of “floating without a point of anchor,” a mode of
Being the State has historically attempted to cover-up in creating a narrative of modern “Japan.”
In contrast, Shimizu’s American re-make The Grudge remains thoroughly anchored.
Jameson’s argument concerning the Western “journalist-witness” applies well to Shimizu’s re168

make: Karen investigates the “collective” sins in an individualistic paradigm, as if she will be
able to achieve a position outside of the collective. In the Japanese version, Rika contrastingly
cannot hope to be a mere witness. Ju-On, in turn, is not a film about its protagonist, but a film
about all of Japan. This distinction is crucial: it is not the collective haunting the individual but
rather the collective haunting the collective. Popular American horror films largely evoke
deviance from the assumed original promises of the country while, in J-Horror, it is postulated
that there is communal dismay against the repressive stability of State-imposed collectivity. A
vital question remains – why, at the turn of the century, did Americans import so many of these
films? Why do they continue to hold such fascination with Western audiences?
One might surmise the phenomenon is merely a novelty item American audiences crave.
Or, perhaps, it offers a way for the spectator to feel safe. It’s Them, not Us, who has a
postmodern identity crisis. While these reasons likely hold some validity, these encounters also
permit one to recognize themselves within ghostly narratives. The constant repression of an
unstable foundation at play beneath every State-orchestrated collective begins to lose its rigid
grip in Shimizu’s cinematic realm. In a decade when the virtual is saturating the lives of most
global citizens, it was not enough to ask how one could go back. One was forced, in Shimizu’s
films, to ask what it meant to be “Japanese” or “American” in the first place. In the decade
following the presidency of George W. Bush and the hyper-patriotism at work in activist groups
such as the Tea Party, these questions only become more pressing. At the moment, popular
horror films in America generally maintain a tendency to “re-repress” perpetually what once
returned. One need only look as far as the thoroughly “Americanized” The Grudge to find that in
the majority of American horror films a trauma is located for an individual to face, such as a
Japanese mother and son’s unresolved woe against the violence of the father, and then resolve
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(the recognition of a Western man’s interference in the marriage). J-Horror, against this formula,
tends to emphasize issues of postmodernity while threatening to expose the modern subject to a
space – and, as we will see in the following section, a temporality – outside of familiar
paradigms of Western modernity.
Thawing Out Jack
To pursue Shimizu’s postmodern innovations in the horror genre, one must also consider
the temporal implications in conjunction with the constructs of Nation hereto touched upon.
Temporality, Shimizu’s films recall, plays a crucial role in Western modes of modernization and
in the attendant spread of Western values into other realms of the globe. Concepts such as
“progress” have developed from static notions of the temporal; by tracing the development of
what came before, and aspiring towards what lies ahead, the modern subject is continuously
caught in the forward motion of a calculated mechanism designed to “keep time.” Indeed, as
industrialism has spread, this concept has become ever more rigid and commodified. One now
consumes time, punching in/out at the factory or “spending” it on leisure activities. This trend
manifests itself across the globe. The International Meridian Conference of 1884 established a
world clock which kept the globe under the relentless sway of homogenous time. Consequently,
Western and Eastern thinkers rage against the ticking of institutionalized hours. Philosopher
Henri Bergson, in his numerous studies on the theme of memory and time, contests: “Let us also
cast off the bad metaphysics which cramps our movements” (Bergson 1913, 103). Time, Bergson
argues, is an artificial narrative born in the modern age, a narrative, he contests, one should
continue to re-evaluate critically. In the remaining pages of this chapter, I will examine how
Shimizu in particular considers atemporality in tandem with the paranormal to challenge Western

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paradigms, providing an alternative consideration of the horror genre which departs from
familiar, linear designs.
Contemporary scholarship holds interest in atemporality as a cinematic tool capable of
revising narrow perspectives adopted from Western traditions. Film scholar Todd McGowan
addresses the problem of temporality, through a psychoanalytical lens, as a construct in
“traditional” cinematic form closely aligned with desire, while he contends atemporality is
closely tied to drive, unconscious repetitions defining an eternal human condition. Atemporal
cinema offers “an alternative way of experiencing existence in time – or, more exactly, a way of
experiencing existence outside of our usual conception of time” (McGowan, 10). In other words,
one desires the pacing, the refusals and climaxes classical Hollywood narratives provide;
however, against this pull towards satisfaction, atemporal films reveal a refusal of regimented
Time and offers in its stead the revelation of pure repetition. This suggests a method to unclutter
the restricted consciousness of modern subjects and expose the unconscious expanses of
unregulated Time. Examples include, but are hardly limited to, Christopher Nolan’s Memento
(2000) and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994).
These radical alternatives to Western constructions of temporality, film scholar Bliss Cua
Lum adds, are grounded in a discussion of cultural difference. After all, homogenous time, she
and McGowan acknowledge, is a uniquely Western ideal, shaped by Western modes of
capitalism and other particularly Western traditions. Therefore, Lum contests, atemporal cinema
utilized by non-Western filmmakers affords an opportunity to react against a coercive global
consciousness. Lum uses the term “immiscible times”: “multiple times that never quite dissolve
into the code of modern time consciousness” (Lum 2009, 12). Specifically, Lum focuses on the
intersection of the genre of the fantastic with notions of atemporality, positing that foreign

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filmmakers including Shimizu embrace the supernatural as a vehicle for exploring notions of
“primitiveness” and the acausality of imperial ghosts: “The fantastic as temporal translation can,
at its most uncanny, allude to the ‘always possible means of a space outside of language’, of a
world outside our familiar time” (32). McGowan and Lum therefore engage critically with the
role of cinematic temporality as a constitutive element within the consciousness of contemporary
subjects.
These concepts are not unfamiliar among Japanese philosophers in the last century. Since
the Taisho era (1912 – 1926), a common refrain among Japanese thinkers has been the phrase
“overcome modernity.” Numerous works interrogate modernity and, in the process, question the
presumptions underlying it as a project worthy of wholesale adoption. While Japanese society
initially raced to modernize and “catch up” with the West, certain intellectuals posed serious
doubts regarding the temporal underpinnings of modernity. Philosophers including Nishida
Kitaro, Watsuji Tetsuro, Tanabe Hajime, and Yuasa Yasuo interrogated scientific quantification
of Time and explore the ethical implications of adopting these reductive structures for the
archipelago. Attempts to “overcome modernity” were not limited to Japan; in truth, it was a
transnational dialogue including a wide array of Western thinkers, ranging from philosopher
Martin Heidegger to psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Figures across the globe return ad nauseum to the
topic of how to re-conceptualize Time without internalizing what Bergson labels as the “bad
metaphysics” espoused in constructs of Western “progress.”
In studying Shimizu’s oeuvre, one revisits postulates of temporality in contemporary
cinema as well as the transnational possibilities Lum illuminates. Still, though much of
atemporal cinema investigates the overlaps and disjuncture between the past and present, few
works before Shimizu’s seriously contemplate ruptures executed from the future. Popular films

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Ju-On and Reincarnation, when read in connection to Japanese philosopher’s attempts to
“overcome modernity” and the work of Carl Jung on the subject of “synchronicity,” critique time
in order to re-evaluate futurity as well as communal interdependence. Previous works addressing
the horror genre, particularly films put forth by Hollywood, are normally situated within a
Freudian framework (i.e., a troubled past begets a troubled present). Shimizu, in sharp contrast,
asks if “the uncanny” might emanate from the past, present, and future simultaneously.
To appreciate Shimizu’s temporal experiments in the horror genre, one must first define
“synchronicity” in Western as well as Eastern thought, pulling equally from the works of Carl
Jung and Yuasa Yasuo. I will then turn to the popular films Ju-On in relation to philosopher
Watsuji Tetsuro’s concept of “betweenness,” a product of his thought on communalism as it is
forged in Time. The director teases from these philosophical precedents the ethical implications
of atemporality in the horror genre. We will close by considering Shimizu’s Reincarnation in
order to analyze fully his transnational impact on the genre and cinema at large. This particular
film reinvigorates the tired historicism Jameson locates in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980)
and, in so doing, attempts to transcend the restrictions of modern cinematic Time placed upon
works of horror.
Jung and Yuasa: “Synchronicity” and the Paranormal
Synchronism is the prejudice of the East; causality is the modern prejudice of the West.
(Jung 1928, 10)

The vast majority of Western horror films have been interpreted, alongside their Gothic
literary antecedents, as vehicles for Freudian criticism. According to critics of the genre, Freud’s
model of psychoanalysis provides tools for better understanding the fears and pleasures
accompanying the genre. This discourse includes “the return of the repressed,” a critical
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connection famously fostered by film scholar Robin Wood, as well as “the uncanny.” Critic
William Patrick Day explains the connection between Freud and horror as follows:
The Gothic is not a crude anticipation of Freudianism, nor its unacknowledged father.
Rather, the two are cousins, responses to the problems of selfhood and identity, sexuality
and pleasure, fear and anxiety as they manifest themselves in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The Gothic arises out of the immediate needs of the reading public to
escape from conventional life and articulate define the turbulence of their psychic
existence. We may see Freud as the intellectual counterpart of this process. (Day 1985,
179)
Though in some ways a productive paradigm, this utilization of Freudian analysis in the horror
film tradition also reveals a certain promulgation of metaphysics based on a tendency to
industrialize and homogenize. Freudian scholarship relies largely upon causality; individual
consciousness, according to the German doctor, is plagued by biological urges and perversions
developed over time, symptomatic effects preceded by categorized causes.
Carl Jung was a colleague of Freud’s and arguably the second-best known psychoanalyst
in the history of the discipline. Yet he decidedly branches away from Western thought in much
of his writing, a significant reason for his estrangement to Freud, and quite possibly one of the
reasons why few scholars today cite Jung when interpreting horror films.

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F. David Peat, in his

study of Jung, acknowledges, “While Freud was based in a rational scientific tradition, Jung was
more interested in spiritualism, fantasy, and the curious nature of images drawn and dreamed”
(Peat 1987, 11). Jung’s theories demonstrate a deep-seated interest in the occult, experiencing for
himself paranormal phenomena throughout his life. He based many of his theories on this subject
matter from studies on Eastern philosophy and religion. Jung’s reliance on Eastern thought, in

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tandem with his personal belief in the paranormal, developed further by one of his major
commentators, philosopher Yuasa Yasuo, allows one to comprehend Shimizu’s atemporal
reactions against Western-style modernity while likewise exposing the privileging of a Freudian
framework in readings of American horror.

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Before analyzing Shimizu’s reliance on Jungian departure points, I will briefly
distinguish Freud’s approach from Jung’s concept of “synchronicity.” An example of Freud’s
prevalence in the study of horror is “the uncanny.” He defines the “uncanny” as “that class of
frightening which leads back to what is known and long familiar” (Freud 1917 – 1919, 220
emphasis mine). This method clearly follows a linear trajectory as the troubled past interrupts an
unsatisfactory present. In contrast to these causal chains, Jung was captivated by an idea he
labeled “synchronicity.” Based on the eerie premonitions one has of an event happening
concomitantly or in the future, Jung’s construct is entirely acausal and atemporal. Yuasa Yasuo,
the preeminent Japanese interpreter of Jung, writes: “Freud conceives of the unconscious as
storage of past experiences closely related to the individual’s (or individual body’s) life
experience (personal unconscious). In contrast, Jung thought that beneath the personal
unconscious is the region of the transpersonal collective unconscious… the domain where it
functions has no temporal and spatial limitations” (Yuasa 2008, 171 emphasis mine). The term
“synchronicity” derives meaning from the roots syn (together) and chronos (time). Jung thus
believes there to be a collective unconscious refusing to obey the dictates of modern time, in
opposition to Freud’s compliance. If one invests in Jung’s hypothesis, “uncanniness” can no
longer be contained as “known and long familiar.” In contrast, the logic of time is disrupted by
atemporal hauntings.

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The dynamism at work in Jung’s “collective unconscious” challenges the causality of
Freud’s individual unconscious. This is particularly relevant when considering the paranormal
(director Shimizu’s subject matter of choice), as both Freud and Jung developed some of their
most lasting contributions to the field by considering spectrality. Jung derived much of his
thinking on “synchronicity” from Eastern thought, in particular the Chinese classic I-Ching; his
innovative use of these materials was intimately connected to the (then considered) mysticism of
astrology and quantum physics. Yuasa, who takes the scattered treatises on the paranormal left
by Jung and develops them, defines “synchronicity” as “the coincidence of the cognition of the
meaning of information concerning the psychological event and the physical event” (98). Yuasa
claims Jung’s notion of “synchronicity,” akin to premonition, has long been debated by Eastern
philosophers. The collective unconscious, according to Yuasa, is bound to Absolute Time and
therefore transcends modernity’s isolation of the past and present from the future. All are
interconnected, “the past and future are enfolded within the present” (139). While Freud
dismisses Jung’s approach as abstraction, with no scientific merit, Yuasa adopts a Jungian stance
to contest that it is narrow-minded to overlook common occurrences including coincidence and
dreams foretelling death. Jung states:
It is extremely difficult to see where one process ends and another begins, since events
and processes, beginnings and endings, merge into each other and form, strictly speaking,
an indivisible continuum. We divide the processes from one another for the sake of
discrimination and understanding, knowing full well that at the bottom every division is
arbitrary and conventional. (Jung 1934, 143)
Why, after all, is it impossible one could be haunted by events outside of their personal
knowledge, or something frightening yet to come?

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Shimizu’s films echo these questions. Why

must one assume that hauntings are individuated, confined to the interactions of an individual’s
present with their specific past?

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While Western scholarship concerning horror film tends to avoid atemporality in favor of
predictable and controllable causality, figures such as Yuasa and Shimizu maintain that
atemporal hauntings open wider avenues for inquiry in regards to horror films and their broader
social significance. What are the consequences of expanding in this way the definition of a term
such as “uncanniness”? And what does Shimizu’s cinematic experiment mean for the modern
subject as well as the community in which she exists?
It must be noted that the experience of being visited by phantoms from the future, for
Jung and for multiple Japanese philosophers over the last one hundred years, has not been a
pleasurable “escape”; rather, the negation of modern temporality terrifies. Nishida Kitaro, a
philosopher from the Kyoto School who questioned modern constructions of temporality in the
early twentieth century, saw the recognition of deaths that have come before as well as those yet
to come as a genuinely unsettling prospect: “Only a being that knows its own eternal death truly
knows its sheer individuality… the self truly realizes its own temporal uniqueness as it faces its
own eternal negation” (Nishida, 67 emphasis mine). Writing in the year World War II came to an
end, philosopher Tanabe Hajime interrogated the position of a selfhood negated by the
viciousness of death in war and the follies of mankind, a phenomenon some foresaw during the
course of the war and predicted would arrive again - and again - in the years ahead. While the
victor (the United States) had the luxury of continued belief in linear progress, Tanabe
apprehended how the role of “vanquished subject” might offer a privileged philosophical
position fueled by atemporality. The Ego, he insists, is ceaselessly invaded by “eternal death”
and faces the initial horror of Absolute Time as “circulatory… a sense in which the past already

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holds the future and is mediated by it” (Tanabe 1986, 73). In short, multiple twentieth century
Japanese philosophers do not view the obliteration of systems of modern temporality as a
comforting, mystical ideal but instead establish “synchronicity” as painful, sorrowful, and
grotesque. At stake in Shimizu’s atemporality is a re-imagining of the individual within a
community outside of the modern visions of Time exported from Western thought. In its place
rises a sort of rhizomatic prism, a Deleuzian time-image to challenge long-held beliefs. That
which has been repressed returns from the past as well as the future of a personal and collective
unconscious to force one into ethical debates concerning the present.
Communal Ethics: Ju-On and “Betweenness”
It is difficult to piece together the shards of Ju-On’s temporal puzzle because the world of
ghosts defies calendar time. (Lum, 211)
Shimizu’s version of “synchronicity” echoes Jung and Yuasa’s in striving not only for
poetic dissonance but also for a re-evaluation of communal ethics. For the director, at the heart of
Western-influenced modernity is an intimate connection transcending the boundaries of
homogenized temporal perception. Jung writes:
If – and it seems plausible – the meaningful coincidence or “cross-connection” of events
cannot be explained causally, then the connection principle must lie in the equal
significance of parallel events; in other words, their tertium comparationis is meaning.
We are so accustomed to regard meaning as a psychic process or content that it never
enters our heads to suppose that it could exist outside the psyche. (Jung 1960, 66)
Jung, Yuasa, and later Shimizu utilize atemporal experience as a vehicle for contemplating the
“meaning” that binds every human being to their neighbors. They imagine this revelation as an
eerie, unnerving encounter as it, out of necessity, disconcerts the contemporary subject.
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Shimizu’s film Ju-On (2002) engages a non-linear form to approach such “meaning” as
existing “outside of the psyche.” The syuzhet, a Russian formalist term for the order in which
cinematic shots are edited together (regardless of the narrative’s chronology, or fabula), is
disjointed. Like the snapshot being taped together at the opening of the film, segments of Ju-On
are not readily pieced together, jumping back and forth in time with few anchors to remind the
spectator of how to order the events sequentially. The grainy, fragmented black-and-white
footage alerts the audience that the murder of Kayako took place in the past (at least, if one can
trust the common cinematic markers constructing the film’s temporal orientation – an
assumption Shimizu will call into doubt as the film progresses). Ju-On then moves forward to
Rika attending to a local family who happen to live in Kayako’s former home, the focal point of
the paranormal activity. From here, the syuzhet moves rather freely and the characters
interchange roles at the center of the film’s focus, from a possessed husband and wife (Katsuya
and Kazumi) to a sister (Hitomi) to a former detective involved in the case (Toyoma) to the
detectives daughter (Izumi) and finally back to Rika. The one constant is “the grudge” haunting
the house and its ability to spread, like a virus, outward into Japanese society.
Ju-On plays with the notion of Time as Absolute rather than linear-progressive.
Shimizu’s film concentrates on repetition, attempting to convey for the audience a sensation of
time “piling up” rather than developing from point A to B. In one example, Hitomi has fled onto
an elevator; as the elevator moves up, the audience glimpses the ghostly child Toshio staring at
her. He appears on every floor with the same expression. The “piling” suggests what Jung
foretold: “It cannot be a question of cause and effect, but of a falling together in time” (Jung
1960, 19). The fury attached to the event far surpasses the event itself within an individual
consciousness; the raw emotions grow significantly more meaningful by speaking to a wider

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audience and alerting them to an essence outside of the individual psyche. The characters
interchange as the haunting folds in from every direction, without predictability. The sensation of
fear the characters share within a collective unconscious, fear of an Absoluteness intruding upon
the framing devices of modern life, remains constant.
The center of Shimizu’s haunting, as was discussed earlier in this chapter, is less a
particular house and more a wider Japanese community. In sum, a petrifying concept plagues the
film: what comes before the present impacts the characters and, in turn, what is yet to come
weighs just as heavily, ripples of eternity moving outward and inward without end. Watsuji
Tetsuro, a Japanese philosopher well-known for his explorations of space and time, draws
attention to the dual meaning of ie in the Japanese language. It is both a physical structure (the
home) as well as a psychic structure (the bonds of family). Watsuji finds beneath these structures
atemporality: “The household member, then, is not merely parent or child, husband or wife; he is
also a descendent of his ancestors and himself an ancestor to those that are to come. The ‘house’
thus evinces most starkly the fact that the family as a whole takes precedence over its individual
members” (Watsuji 1988, 141). While Watsuji, writing in a time of social upheaval and
resistance to Western encroachments, was more isolationist in arguing geographical constraints
to these psychic bonds, Shimizu pushes his boundaries further.
The horror of atemporal interconnection recurs throughout Ju-On. When Toyama, the
detective investigating the house, returns to burn it down and end its reign, his temporal
sequence meaningfully overlaps with that of his daughter, whose personal story follows his
segment of the film. Toyama peeks through a doorway and encounters his daughter from the
future, who has also come back to visit the house, not realizing the serious implications of this
temporal violation. For a moment, they stare back at one another. Toyama immediately suffers

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not only from his individual history within the house but from the knowledge his daughter Izumi
will suffer just as he has, that she too will die in the process – the repetitious nature of
impermanence. In the end, the images of Izumi and her father, taken in seemingly limitless
negation and derived from unspeakable acts enclosed within the community, appear side by side
in the family shrine. With this break in Time, Shimizu suggests that the ills of one are the ills of
many and therefore human suffering cannot be readily exorcised from a collective mind. Yuasa
recognizes this as “an invisible network of minds that spreads in the ‘betweenness’ (aidagara) of
each individual” (Yuasa, 97). He continues, “It follows that the collective unconscious is the
same in every place and all time… the collective unconscious has an objective character
transcending the individual” (113). By challenging the continuity of hauntings read through a
Freudian lens, Shimizu offers a vision of the alternative, a “betweenness” revealed through
mutual suffering within “synchronicity.”
Recent film scholarship touches upon these ethics of temporal discontinuity. Lum, for
one, recognizes the disruptions as providing “the beginnings of more ethical temporal
imaginings” (Lum, 41); McGowan adds, “The unconscious which interrupts the flow of meaning
in our everyday interactions and thus separates us from each other, is at once the sole basis for a
connection with each other” (McGowan, 19). For McGowan, atemporal cinema refutes the
imposed desires of Hollywood-constructed time to expose a deeper recognition that all
individuals share non-linear drives and already exist in the vastness of Absolute Time. One
cannot excise themselves from this condition and, with this realization, one realizes a new mode
of contentment.

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Watsuji insists, alongside Tanabe, these ethics will be couched repeatedly in

the fantastic and the unsavory, as it “appears only in the form of the restriction or negation of the
individual” (Watsuji 1996, 99). He notes the dualism of the haunting: “Our present act takes

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place in this identity between the past and the future… the present act has the dynamic structure
of coming back” (271, emphasis mine). The predominant emotional response to Ju-On – fear - is
not limited to the present or past. Anxiety returns from all points in time, “yesterday’s
betweenness” folding into “tomorrow’s betweenness.”
The result, for audiences as well as Rika, appears as an empathy rarely achieved by
horror films produced in Hollywood. Rika realizes at the close of Ju-On it has not been the past
alone plaguing her, as if it was ever clearly delineated from the present/future. In truth, she has
always-already been linked to the psychic state of the slaughtered Kayako as well as to the
psychic state of countless female victims to come. As she looks in the mirror at the dénouement,
it is Kayako’s face staring back and Kayako’s head growing from her abdomen. There is a
conceptual shift moving formulaic sensations of dread away from individuated experiences of
anxiety and towards an ethical sense of communal interdependence.
If atemporal horror provides an opportunity to create “more ethical temporal imaginings,”
then one must ask how this shared affect, a sense of “betweenness” ceaselessly returning, can be
effectively transmitted. To delineate his revision, Shimizu harkens back to concepts developed
by Watsuji. The Japanese philosopher emphasizes infrastructures society creates to handle
spatio-temporal dilemmas, utilizing examples such as the railroad to allow his readers to
visualize their unconscious reliance upon a larger community. Human beings are interconnected
by railways constructed with a certain reliance on where people have gone before and an
anticipation of where people will need to go in the future. He labels this as “socially established
ningen sonzai” (“socially established human existence”). From this example, Watsuji concludes:
“Anticipation of the future exists not only in individual consciousness but also within society
itself” (185). Institutionalized “betweeness” is the manifestation of intuitive responses to the past

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and to the future, situated always in the present. One might take Watsuji’s postulate and apply it
to Shimizu’s contemplation of a complicated network of images unifying communities.
Emotions in film - in Shimizu’s case, predominantly terror - are captured not only to
remember in the present but to haunt the viewers of tomorrow as well. Shimizu reflects upon this
in Ju-On with the surveillance tape that alarms Hitomi. In the tape, a shadow gradually emerges
in a vacant hall. Later in the film, Toyama will flee from this very tape. At this point, however,
the shadow has fully approached the camera and stares directly at him (and, vicariously, the
audience). Celluloid preserves a network to document transpersonal bonds outside of modern
Time, a network based on endless repetition. Elsewhere, Izumi’s friends pick up a package of
pictures taken of her to cheer her up. Upon realizing Izumi is being tormented by specters, the
girls look at the photos and find Izumi’s eyes to be blacked out. Film, as a medium, therefore
embodies “synchronicity,” alerting the viewer to a past already aware of its reception in the
future. These filmed images embody the essence of premonition while manifesting the
interconnectedness of suffering subjects across space and time.
In the final shot of Ju-On, Shimizu removes the mediation of characters in order to shock
the audience into ruminating upon their reliance on “betweenness.” Kayako opens her eyes to
stare directly into the darkened theatre. The eeriness stems less from vicarious dread, as when the
spectator steps inside of the shared gaze of Rika and feels the gaze of Takeo, and more from the
fact the ghost has broken all temporal restrictions. She can see the viewer sitting out there, in the
future. Unfettered from linear narrative, Kayako trivializes the desire to tape the pieces of the
film together in logical order and offers an ominous revelation: an atemporal drive at the base of
the collective, forcing the audience member to contemplate the inconceivable expanse of eternal

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repetition. It is, as we will see shortly, the medium (film) which for Shimizu manifests best the
atemporality of the haunting.
Genre: Reincarnation and a Grand Re-opening of the Overlook Hotel
One’s self who is observing the event is incorporated into the event as a whole. In other words,
we are not observing phenomena from the outside. (Yuasa, 104)

Shimizu’s film Reincarnation (2005) deliberately merges his discussions of
“synchronicity” with a critical examination of the cultural relationship between Japan and
Western countries. Reincarnation situates itself as a film in overt dialogue with the American
horror genre and its temporal markers, in particular with the temporality of Stanley Kubrick’s
film The Shining (1980). Jameson analyzes the importance of repetition in Western films by
auteurs including Kubrick. In his influential essay on The Shining, Jameson argues, as he does
elsewhere, that when genres become self-conscious, they are no longer capable of “authentic
expression.” Horror, according to Jameson’s analysis, is deliberately reified in The Shining.
Kubrick mirrors the plight of Jack Torrance with the plight of the ghost story writ large as it
grows stale, predictable, a “jail house of repetition.” When a genre first forms, for Jameson, it is
an eruption of communal sentiment. But when one becomes aware of it as genre, the once
“unimaginable future” becomes lost to foreclosure at the hands of late capitalist production. As
Jack grows weary of his domesticated life, the only solace he can take is in a nostalgic return to
the roaring 1920s, where he assumes one will find communal embrace, albeit by the alreadydead. This movement is one-directional - always backwards, to the past - and so Jack is caught in
the logic of modernity and Western constructs of Time. He succumbs to consumable moments
pre-arranged within familiar constructs of History (and, for the spectator, well-worn plot points

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of horror). Jack, by the close of the film, quite literally freezes in time, stilled in a photograph
hanging in the lobby of the Overlook Hotel as well as in the frame posited by The Shining.
Jameson re-phrases a question he believes Kubrick to be asking with his film:
How to project the illusion that things still happen, that events exist, that there are still
stories to tell, in a situation in which the uniqueness and the irrevocability of private
destinies and of individuality itself seem to have evaporated? (Jameson 1992, 87)
The modern concept of Time, closed off by genre, reveals itself to be an always-already artificial
container. For Jameson, repetition in The Shining manifests in unnatural ways, as a present
sealed off from the “unimaginable future” through a circuitous recall of a packaged past. Garrett
Stewart, in his recent work on temporality and the cinema, argues along similar lines when
considering genre: “A history of violence is seen to repeat itself, first as tragedy, then not as
farce but as genre fiction and its cheap catharsis… a case of framed time in perpetuity” (Stewart
2007, 112). Shimizu’s revision of The Shining takes a different tact when considering genre.
Instead of prompting late capitalist estrangement, Shimizu relies upon the trope of ghostly
repetition, especially in Kubrick’s film, to expose a transnational reading of the horror genre.
In Shimizu’s Reincarnation (original Japanese title: Rinne), the genre is stretched beyond
the self-enclosed “prison” of late capitalist culture. Missing in their respective readings is the
oversight Watsuji accentuates in regards to Heiddegerian thought: there is too much emphasis on
Time without enough consideration of its relationship to Space. In brief, genre as it is filmed and
exchanged is not limited to the temporal perspectives of an individual spectator. Shimizu’s
continuous return to the concept of visual recording reveals “betweenness” as networked within
real-world structures, such as film and video distribution. Jameson’s argument, that one’s
emotional response to Jack’s rampage and Kubrick’s narrative is cold and detached in the age of

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postmodernity, grows weakened with the revival of shared affect in transnational circulation. The
“false lead” of premonition among certain characters (as Jameson reads it) in The Shining revives
as a “new lead” in Shimizu’s adaptation; in turn, this exchange opens up a mutual recognition of
repetition as a central component of the human condition. Jack and the horror genre are unfrozen,
reincarnated, given an alternative purpose of embracing atemporal, and aspatial, cinematic
realms to express the anxieties of a collective unconscious repressed beneath constructions of
homogenous time.

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Reincarnation sustains commentary on the influence of American horror in Japan as well
as the problem of temporal borrowings from Hollywood narratives. The film circles around a
group of actors re-enacting a “true-life” murder. The director Matsumura invests in the
authenticity of a work entitled “Kioku,” or “Memories,” and urges the actors to attempt to
channel sensations “real victims” must have felt. The plot follows two parallel story lines:
Sugiura, an soft-spoken aspiring actress, and Kinoshita, a college student. Both young women
are drawn mysteriously towards the location of the crime, Kanko Hotel, a Western-style structure
clearly modeled after Kubrick’s Overlook. And so the characters congregate, gradually, at the
isolated hotel, where Time merges in disturbing ways.
Shimizu’s style aggregates Western and Japanese cinematic techniques. Jay McRoy, a
scholar who has written extensively on Japanese horror, comments: “By combining in his own
words ‘an American and Japanese style’ of horror cinema, Shimizu creates a hybrid of the U.S.
slasher film and the Japanese kaidan” (McRoy 2005, 176). This is demonstrated in
Reincarnation as specific shots overtly mirror Kubrick’s style. The director Matsumura himself
pays homage to Kubrick when composing his “tracking shots” through the Kanko Hotel. The
room in which the worst of the murders, of a young girl, Chisato, is Room 227, an evocative

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number fit perfectly between Stephen King’s version of The Shining (Room 217) and Kubrick’s
version (Room 237). Another familiar motif is a ball bouncing through the corridors, echoing
Jack’s tennis ball from the original. Elsewhere, Sugiura stares down at a scale model of the hotel,
which slowly transforms into an overhead shot of the literal space. The effect of this homage is
two-fold: first, it reminds one of the cinematic/psychic connection between The Shining and
Shimizu’s film, echoing Jack’s ominous stare down into the hedge-maze; secondly, it
foreshadows a psychic link between Sugiura, who is at first presumed to be the victim, and the
killer, Dr. Omori - and, to go further back, with Jack Torrance himself. Genre therefore becomes
a method for establishing temporal bonds with previous atrocities and atrocities to come as well
as spatial bonds between Western and Japanese horror films, viewed by people who, regardless
of geographical grounding, have seen this type of story countless times – and whose children will
likely see it countless more.
To emphasize this shared affliction, Reincarnation constantly forces the viewer to make
leaps through Time, removing the security attendant to modern temporality and cinematic
continuity. In one of the earliest scenes of the film, a truck driver is looking in the mirror and
watches his face transform into a grey, corpse-like visage. Unnerved by this, he proceeds to drive
his truck off into a mountain pass, eventually hitting a bellboy who mysteriously appears on the
road. Leaping out to inspect the victim, the driver is startled to find the same face that reflected
back at him earlier in the day. Later, both Sugiura and Kinoshita experience premonitions of the
hotel, seeing it in their unconscious. Sugiura’s agent reassures her that, even if she is a
reincarnation of the little girl who was killed, it does not mean the atrocities will occur again. Of
course, they do. Here one finds the acme of Shimizu’s atemporal thesis to be that what haunts the
driver/bellboy and the two female protagonists is an unsavory event taking place in the past; yet

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it is simultaneously a premonition of an event to be re-enacted later in Reincarnation. The past
and the future relentlessly press down upon the present, as in many of Shimizu’s works,
ultimately driving the characters to demise at the hands of their impermanence.
Shimizu’s formal technique echoes this sensation at key moments in the film. When
Matsumura receives a box from a victim of the attacks, he starts to open it. There is then a jumpcut to move one ahead in time, to Matsumura finishing/repeating this gesture later that night.
Though the cut appears seamless, in actuality it pushes the narrative forward considerably. At
another moment, little Chisato stands right behind the director in his office. She then flees out the
door, through the hall of the Kanko Hotel as it appeared in the past, well-decorated, yet-to-be
abandoned, only to arrive at Kinoshita’s doorway in the present. The ghost runs across time and
space in a mere matter of moments. In another example, Sugiura dreams of walking through the
front door of the Kanko Hotel and picking up Chisato’s doll, an object which serves as a very
important anchor for the story. She then hears someone coming, drops the doll, and enters the
Hotel. Kinoshita enters the frame, following the exact path, picking up the doll as well. At this
moment, Kinoshita is startled from slumber, alerting one to the fact that this was yet another
premonition, a memory sent from the past/future. Shimizu moves the spectator from Sugiura’s
unconscious into Kinoshita’s unconscious, sutured only through the psychic space of the Hotel.
Jung and Yuasa’s concept of “synchronicity” explains much of the atemporal play in which
Shimizu engages. The characters, as with the viewers of the film, experience paranormal
phenomenon as their grasp on spatio-temporal reality is called into doubt.
While Ju-On fosters empathy among victims, a psychic connection of vulnerability at the
hands of death and suffering, Reincarnation insists upon alliance among perpetrators. The
audience is led into assuming Sugiura to be a reincarnate of Chisato, the initial victim. However,

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as Sugiura and Dr. Omori lie in wait following the murders and their re-enactment, they each
raise a reflective object to end their life – Sugiura a piece of shattered glass, Omori a polished
knife. As they do so, they come face to face with their reflection, only to find themselves
suddenly staring into one another’s eyes. Sugiura is shocked to discover she is psychically linked
to Omori, Omori equally unhinged to realize his fate belongs to an innocent young woman in the
future. Much like the moment shared by Toyama and his daughter in Ju-On, but significantly
inverted, the atemporal encounter insists characters recognize their mutual interdependence, not
only as victims but as those who occasionally violate the social order. No one can escape the
interconnection at work within a communal haunt.
The cinematic medium undercuts Omori’s desire for escape. There can be no origin or
final resting place, only eternity, endless time lapsing on itself and sprawling out in every
conceivable direction, into every virtual locale. Omori, who filmed all of his murders, initially
feels confident his experiments will liberate him from the mono no aware (impermanence) of
everyday life. He believes his desire to enter into Absolute Time will re-unite him with his
massacred family in a higher state of being. He asks, “Hito wa doko kara kitte, doko itte shimau
no?” (“Where do people come from, where do they go?”). Each act concurrently echoes actions
of the past and those of the future. Omori’s fate parallels Rika’s; all individuals find negation in
Absolute Time.

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In psychoanalytic terms, upon undoing the trappings of desire, one returns

once more to the persistence of drive.
Energies binding one to a conceivable world community are re-enforced by Shimizu’s
meditations on the horror genre. As Lum notes, “Even if one has not encountered this particular
ghost film before, one has encountered ghost narratives like it before” (Lum, 220). By reifying
formulas to evoke fear, and coding them in a relatively homogenous form (genre), cinema

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engages in the kind of repetition earlier Japanese philosophers elucidated. Horror film, outside of
its temporal restraints, retains an essential spatial component with the distribution of ghostly
stories across different groups of people. Within the film itself, Suguira’s agent watches Omori’s
macabre film in direct parallel with Shimizu’s film. His realization, as he spots Suguira’s
reflection in the knife, is likewise the realization of the audience. Shimizu insists that although
film always binds the past with the present, as Bergson has shown, it is also always an intuitive
conversation with the future. As the agent watches the horrific event, the spectator experiences
related emotions at the same moment. As The Shining influenced Reincarnation, Reincarnation
undoubtedly influences filmmakers yet to be born. The repetition Jameson argues to be pastiche
par excellence in Kubrick’s film for Shimizu envelops the entire community through a psychic
link.
While Jameson argues there is finality in Kubrick’s playfulness with the horror genre,
Shimizu insists this kind of repetition provides a powerful revelation. McGowan contends that,
from such an opportunity, “There is a decision of whether to embrace repetition” (McGowan,
235). Absolute Time, repressed by modern constructs of the clock, can either return to haunt in
uncomfortable ways or it can allow one to elect to begin breaking down restricted social
concepts of temporality. Regardless of one’s Japanese or American citizenship, fear of eternity
repressed by an ever-resilient individuality is an emotion binding one as a global commune in the
grips of modern time; in other words, global citizens increasingly share the same possibility for a
reaction against the privileged logic of linear cause-and-effect. Shimizu’s works suggest Jack’s
icy grin in the lobby of the Overlook, re-enacted by Sugiura at the close of Reincarnation, does
not signal the close of the horror genre. Quite contrastingly, the iciness evokes an impending rebirth, glimpses of a spectral network ever-present at the frozen edges of a reified modernity.

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A Western Wake
Difference and Doubt in Christopher Nolan’s Inception

Contemporary fiction repeatedly explores “Japan” as a dream-world positioned beyond
the limitations of the physical. It is imagined as a realm into which protagonists from Western
countries such as America, Britain, or France wander, lose themselves, and eventually depart
from in a figurative “return home.” There is nothing particularly novel about this pseudodialectical maneuvering; critic Joe Lockard writes it is simply taking place in “a conceptual
economy where old ideas are being recycled as new postmodern discoveries” (Lockard, 183). In
truth, as we saw in the first chapter, as early as the 1890s Hearn was contemplating Japan while
deliberating on the function of dreams, utilizing his fantasy version of the country to advocate
improvement in industrialized societies. Broadly speaking, encounters with cultural Others have
always held an integral role in Western metaphysics, prompting many to draw loosely from
philosophers such as G.W.F. Hegel. However, this chapter attempts to address a shift, from the
threadbare formula found in the majority of cyberpunk works into what is attempted in
Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010).

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The title is meant to evoke a double-meaning.

“Waking” describes Western characters in cyberpunk fiction who exit from the dream-world of
“Japan,” ostensibly returning to reality; concurrently, “wake” marks the figurative death knell of
Western subjectivity - a critical turn to be analyzed later in this chapter. Within the process of
dream-work which constructs an imaginary “Japan” in Nolan’s film, Western subjectivity is both
fortified and de-stabilized.

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In the introduction to Race in Cyberspace, Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman offer the
following summation of recent depictions of “Japan”:
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Cyberspace can provide a powerful coalition building and progressive medium for
‘minorities’ separated from each other by distance and other factors. On the other hand,
these nodes of race in cyberspace are marked as being parts of the whole, islands of
otherness in a largely white, male, and middle-class cyber-space. (Kolko, 9)
The archipelago, which became a token mise-en-scene for cyberpunk fiction, was a nation whose
technological prowess became via export its main identification. Already invested with an aura
of mysticism by years of Orientalist discourse, “Japan” plays in these stories the part of absolute
Other, a playground for dreamers who can control their escape from Western-based models by
gauging their comfort with the construct. In short, various narratives during the late twentieth
century re-assert the formula of an adventurer who visits an exotic, Eastern locale, meditates on
the difference, and then “wakes” back into the safety of home a wiser individual. Jameson deems
this type of phenomenon as “the old pseudo-Hegelian caricature of the
thesis/antithesis/synthesis” (Jameson 2009b, 19). The certitude of Western metaphysics remains
unchanged as it is manifested in these layered dreams; the protagonist appreciates what he/she is
not and subsequently adapts.
This formula, as it merges with the hyper-reality of late capitalism, also opens the
possibility for radical revision, including an opportunity for doubt, a variation we will discuss as
a key component in Inception. Conflating “Japan” with the concept of technology offers a reimagining of earlier representative forms. In Full Metal Apache, cultural scholar Takayuki
Tatsumi argues, “The technology of race reflects race produced by technology, suggesting a
chiastic logic that illuminates the late capitalistic literary and cultural crossroads that not only
link Japan and the United States but also replace the logic of causal influence with that of global
synchronicity” (Tatsumi, 29, emphasis mine). Visions of “Japan,” re-constructed by, as well as
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re-constructing, the virtual realm, accelerate into a blur in which points of reference are lost, not
unlike the shifts taking place in Gremlins as well as Shimizu’s films (see chapters 5 and 6).
Pseudo-Hegelian metaphysics, fundamentally based upon causality, is gradually undone by this
chiastic logic. The certainty of dream and reality starts to fade, first between “Japan” and the
“United States,” then within the very precepts of cultural difference. What originates as
simulated Otherness exposes, for Nolan, the uncertainty of all subjectivities. Julia Kristeva
examines the “wake” as follows:
Confronting the foreigner whom I reject and with whom at the same time I identify, I lose
my boundaries, I no longer have a container… I feel “lost,” “indistinct,” “hazy.” The
uncanny strangeness allows for many variations: they all repeat the difficulty I have in
situating myself with respect to the other and keep going over the course of
identification-projection that lies at the foundation of my reaching autonomy. (Kristeva,
187)
While Inception can be read as a commentary on the imagining of multiple global spaces (in
particular, Mal’s “Old Europe”), this chapter will focus on the film’s depiction of “Japan”
because it is predominantly by contemplating the country’s “strangeness,” being in “wake,” and
the protagonist’s mis-reading of his own condition at this crucial juncture, that the audience
glimpses the alienation within themselves, the weakness at the core of their “reaching
autonomy.” As I believe Nolan's film demonstrates, the synching of two abstract ideals, the
virtual and the Orient, inadvertently exposes the flaws of a standardized dialectic, sans the
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potential of Hegel’s original formulation.

Cyberpunk therefore re-enacts encounters between

cultural Others dependent upon arbitrary significations and thinly-veiled biases - a point that is
always true of the formal dialectic, Adorno will argue, especially in an age of mechanical
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reproduction.

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Nolan articulates this for the audience through his allusions to depiction of

“Japan” in cyberpunk narratives.
Cyberpunk texts recurrently echo Hegel’s critique of Kant and Heidegger’s assumed
overcoming of metaphysics writ large with a belief one can transcend cultural and existential
limitations, moving past illusions on a path ever-closer to Truth.

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One returns to this formula

in discussing cyberpunk as well as other films that explore “waking” as a contemporary dilemma,
including the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999). Inception, in contrast, calls upon
Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics, in which the grounding of Western philosophy, reliant
upon continuous “waking” into a further enlightened state, is revealed to be an elaborate fallacy:
“Delusion is boundless in the field in which the official culture canon deposits its assets, in the
supposedly sublime field of philosophy” (Adorno 1966, 93). At the heart of Western
metaphysics, Adorno argues, is a sleight of hand, an assumption there is a central cultural ground
from which the rest of the system unfolds. He contends that critical theory must reconsider this
assumption. Ramifications arise when analyzing the conceptualizations of “American identity”
in the wake of the 2008 meltdown (at least, as it has been articulated through the cinematic
medium). In response, Nolan’s critical pivot towards an Adornian approach challenges the ways
in which collective dreams, cinematic products of “soft power,” define differences between the
“U.S.” and “Japan” – and ultimately, the entire globe.
“Waking”: The Dialectical Dreaming of “Japan”
Do you know that our word for “nature” is of quite recent coinage? It is scarcely a
hundred years old. We have never developed a sinister view of technology, Mr.

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Laney. It is an aspect of the natural, of oneness. Through our efforts, oneness
perfects itself. (Gibson, 254)
Before considering Christopher Nolan’s revision, one must define how “Japan” has been
systematically represented as a refuge for self-reflection among disenfranchised adventurers, a
pattern articulated previously by scholars including Joshua La Bare. The narratives in question
tend to focus on one or more dis-satisfied protagonists who go on a simulated Bildungsroman.
While wandering abroad in the wired wilderness - frequently identified as “New Japan” - the
protagonist encounters the unnerving potentialities of a world consumed by a loss of referents,
counterfeit identities, and the rise of a technologically-dependent infrastructure. An overview of
this formula will help one to understand how these narrative devices have shaped contemporary
perceptions of “Japan.” Bruce Sterling’s “Maneki Neko” and William Gibson’s Idoru each
exemplify the tradition. Through innovative techniques, their works employ a modified version
of dialectics in order to provide the subject with a chance to transcend the unsavory limitations of
a digitized world.
Bruce Sterling’s short story “Maneki Neko” provides the reader a “Japan” in which
communal bonds have been strengthened to an excessive degree thanks to an omniscient
computer linking human beings together. The protagonist Tsuyoshi early in the narrative is told
by his pokkekon (pocket computer) he needs to give a cup of coffee to a homeless person; the
computer gently tells Tsuyoshi, “He needs it” (Sterling, 4). This charitable act is initially viewed
in a Utopian light, with a sense that in “New Japan” human beings are dependent on technology
to assist them in becoming “more human.” Tsuyoshi observes, “I really believe that computers
help human beings to relate in a much more human way” (9). This romantic notion is scrutinized
by the Asian-American protagonist, Louise Hashimoto. While a prosecutor in Rhode Island, she
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was responsible for undermining a group of hackers and forbidding their access to technology.
Retribution for Louise is that, upon arriving in “Japan,” she is pursued by the digitized copy of a
“maneki neko,” a ubiquitous tourist trinket sold in Japan, modeled after a waving cat. Louise, the
wandering Westerner, resists immersion into Tsuyoshi’s alternative community, loudly
proclaiming her System will not be thwarted: “Your network gift economy is undermining the
lawful, government-approved, regulated economy!” (15). The inter-connected fantasy of “New
Japan” repeatedly threatens her position as an authority figure, challenging the laws she holds to
be self-evident. Louise laments, “I’m up against something that is very very big and very very
patient. And it knows all about me. And it’s got a million arms and legs. And all those arms and
legs are people” (17). “New Japan,” and its link to an all-knowing technology, promises to
dispose of any challengers.
In “Maneki Neko,” readers must either accept the “wake” for human beings decaying at
the hands of technology or, alternatively, spiritually “wake” into a mystical Far East. Each
stereotypical option blurs with the other, creating an impasse for the reader. The story concludes
with Tsuyoshi’s brother arriving to save the day; as was established earlier in the narrative,
Tsuyoshi’s brother is, like Louise, unable to co-exist inside of this virtual reality. He suggests
they retreat into a Zen existence: “It’s a sacred place in the mountains. No computers there, no
phones, nothing… it’s a sanctuary for people like us. And I know the way” (19). Louise decides
to grab his arm and they ascend into a “great beyond.” Importantly, this is where the narrative
closes. Readers cannot glimpse the secrets of the retreat, nor are they left comfortable in the
computer-driven world of Tsuyoshi with its vengeful eccentricities. The reader awakens from
Sterling’s story, part nightmare and part Utopian dream, prompted to feel relief in a position
outside of “Japan’s” parameters, having overcome abstract alternatives which might have refuted
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the dictates of “Western laws and economies.” The reader “wakes” up, recognizing their
limitations as well as the valuable aspects of their former way of life. “Waking” is therefore
synonymous with a pseudo-Hegelian overcoming in Sterling’s tale, a re-assurance there will be
developments through encounters with cultural difference, and nothing will truly need to die in
the process.
Sterling relies upon fantastic elements, a willingness to market “Japan” as hip alterity, a
formalized tool for self-reflection. This phenomenon has elsewhere been referred to as “TechnoOrientalism.” In their work Spaces of Identity, David Morley and Kevin Robins locate in
“Techno-Orientalism” a desire to conceive of “a more human age beyond Western modernity”
(Morley, 149). They posit there is belief among some Western readers that “Japan has come to
exist as the figure of empty and dehumanized technological power” (170). According to Morley
and Robins, virtual technologies have re-enforced, and given a new tropology, to older
Orientalisms: “Japan” is routinely flattened and imagined beyond the perceived organic nature of
Western philosophy. Considering this, critic Veronica Hollinger contends it would be a “hard SF
which recognizes the paradigm-shattering role of technology in postindustrial society” (Hollinger,
210). The cultural component of many of these works, in contrast, assures that modern
paradigms are not shattered in any serious way. They are re-constituted and preserved behind a
futuristic garb. Ironically, by dressing the issue with a guise of cultural difference, the impulse
Morley and Robins argue is preserved in “Techno-Orientalism,” the drive to get past a certain
Western tradition, remains structured by the standardized dialectical schema it seeks to supersede.
Lance Olsen, a scholar of cyberpunk literature, agrees with Hollinger in stating this
pattern lacks real de-stabilizing potential. He views the trend as an indication of “a larger
movement in our contemporary cultural consciousness away from postmodernism and toward
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science fiction’s metaphysical and narrative equivalent of neorealism” (Olsen, 150). Theorist
Marc Guillaume, who relishes the disruptions later manifested in Nolan’s film, adds: “The
excess of individualism or narcissism that people decry today is a compensation or a staging that
helps the subject resist its dispersion… to help it maintain an appearance of unity” (Guillaume,
40). Faced with the unruly potentialities of virtual difference, a culture of hyper-mediated
fantasies, the subject stages an illusion of disquietude through formulaic encounters with “Japan”
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in order to “wake” at choreographed moments.

William Gibson likewise maintains the principles of standardized metaphysics to
encompass a “Techno-Japan.” Gibson’s Idoru (1996) narrates the story of a subject who wanders
into the dream-world of “Japan” in search of something he is missing: a “human experience”
outside of the superficial comforts of the technological realm. The protagonist Laney interprets
his fellow human beings through their digital footprints to uncover the secrets surrounding a
Japanese celebrity, Rez. Gibson’s novel regurgitates themes of “Techno-Orientalism” but also
offers a glimpse at Inception’s framework, in which one cannot avoid implicating the
protagonist’s role as dreamer and, as a result, questioning the reliability of the dream structure
itself.
The milieu of the novel is once more an unsettling “New Japan,” comprised of an
ominous nanotechnology capable of re-generating itself: “miracles of the new technology, as
banal and as sinister as such miracles usually were… part of a façade seemed to move, but it had
to be [Laney’s] eyes” (89). Gibson’s idea of “Japan” is a vision of futurity in which human
beings merge with computers. The archipelago, recently destroyed by an earthquake and
replaced by pure pastiche, appears constructed from bits of fantasy: “Look at a map. A map from
before? A lot of it’s not even where it used to be. Nowhere near… a lot of it’s like they just made
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it up” (50). Gibson also relies on a revision of Orientalist tropes, echoing Hearn’s fin-de-siecle
descriptions of a “fairyland… some secret urban carnival… nothing to pin the place in time but
the fact that the signs were electric…. a street built by leprechauns” (62). Dreamers encounter a
Far Eastern world that seems initially to defy stagnant Western norms.
Laney struggles throughout the novel to touch, beneath sleek surfaces, the “humanity” at
the center of this virtual community (if any still exists). He tries to comprehend the impending
marriage between Rez and the idoru (Rei Toei), a virtual Japanese woman who was created as an
amalgamation of fan desires. After a series of trails, he recognizes Rez cannot be interpreted
with his usual methods because he is, in essence, the embodiment of a corporation.

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The idoru,

on the other hand, remains unwieldy, “the tip of an iceberg… some unthinkable volume of
information… aggregates of subjective desire” (191) and “infinitely more than the combined
sum of her various selves” (217). Still, these Japanese fantasy objects, cryptic in ways
occasionally shocking, retain the promise for Laney of “waking” to an alternative tomorrow, a
promise espousing a unity among the desires of people from around the globe. Gibson’s novel
considers technology first as a legitimate threat, and then as a method with which to re-connect
and transcend the existential alienations of late capitalism.
Synthesis with an imagined “Japan,” at its heart, re-enforces the trappings of Westerncentrism. These trappings offer brief moments of release from the deterministic route of
standardized metaphysics while rarely allowing the protagonist or reader to actually glimpse
negation, any notion of progress without certitude; Adorno’s negative dialectics attempts to pose
such a progress without certitude, a retrieval one perceives being postulated later in Nolan’s
Inception. Idoru derives its narrative from these residual schemas. As “Japan” is imagined in the
novel as being assembled by “desiring machines, aggregates of subjective desire, an architecture
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of articulated longing” (252), the Western dreamer overcomes their limitations by recognizing
that their personal desires and longings are implicated in the foundational construction of the
dream. Laney admits “somehow he had always felt that he never found the central marvel, the
thing that would have made the hunt worthwhile” (241). At that moment, the idoru appears: “the
central marvel here… was Rei Toei” (241). She helps him find what he has been looking for; she
asks, “You’ve been here before, haven’t you? I think that’s how I found it” (242). “Japan,”
posited as a community based on consensual fantasy, at last provides nothing more (or less) than
the fulfillment of what Western dreamers, in their regimented metaphysical mindset, apparently
wish for: an encounter with themselves. In Hegelian terms, consciousness locates itself.
What Laney is seeking, behind layers of hyper-consumerism, does not exist in some
Platonic outside or external fairyland; instead, as Laney visualizes in his encounter with the idoru,
the entire dream is fueled by his longing to connect with himself through interaction with the rest
of the world. Laney’s realization supports the tenets of Hegelian dialectics – realized earlier in
the century by Sidney McCall (see chapter 2) – by uncovering the inter-connectedness of his
consciousness with the fantasies of mankind. Despite an assumed movement past the myth of
“Japan,” the realization one’s consciousness is constantly projecting abstractions, the concept of
progress is still read as forward-moving. Breaking down the origins of a fantasized “Japan” is
less radical than it initially appears to be in that Laney’s (and the reader’s) position is
strengthened rather than challenged. Cultural critic Larry McCaffery reflects upon this need to
isolate something beneath the chaos, to return to a place of comprehension, commenting that a
text such as Idoru “empowers us by providing a cognitive mapping that can help situate us in a
brave new postmodern world” (McCaffery, 16).

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The groundwork allows for a dramatic shift. When Morley and Robins state that
“postmodern technologies become structured into the discourse of Orientalism” (Morley, 169),
one pauses for an Adornian inquiry: will not these technologies eventually turn back upon the
Western dreamer, rendering their authority mute and designating them in equally “post-human”
ways? Where there is a blurring of dream and reality, “Japan” and “Us,” resolved in most of
these fictions, there is also potency, recognition of the utter pervasiveness of myth within the
dreamer’s subjectivity (and within a world that has exhausted itself through countless
metaphysical cycles). The genre allows for an opportunity to call into question the comforts of
standardized dialectical “waking” among Western readers. Perhaps these heavily-constructed
dreams are embedded in the frames with which their departure is articulated; when technology –
including, importantly, cinema – emerges as a vital medium for conceptualizing cultural
difference, the arbitrariness of the system is exposed, its hidden exploitations made glaringly
visible. Consequently, what one has been witnessing all along is a procession accompanying the
last vestiges of a self-certain Western subjectivity, a ritualistic “wake.”
Contemporary science fiction films explore the concept of “waking” in analogous ways
by borrowing from Japanese aesthetics. The Matrix (1999), for example, utilizes the “waking”
trope to contemplate escaping from a society based on commercial fantasy alone.

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Protagonist

Neo’s struggle to overcome the illusions of a modern realm, based on a formula much like the
one this chapter has been examining, neutralizes the radical shock of the initial “waking,” a fact
perhaps explaining the relative disappointment accompanying the film’s two sequels. In short,
when one has overcome the initial barrier of consciousness alongside Neo, there is increasingly
comfort to be had in the formulaic overcoming, belief in a sub-structure guiding the protagonist
to a better tomorrow. As soon as the cord is pulled and the audience collectively “awakens,”
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transcendence is little more than a metaphysical given and the next “waking” is hardly as
exhilarating. In much of cyberpunk, this means the destabilizing premise eventually reveals its
presumptions, the fictions propelling it forward, such as a final arrival at satisfaction through
formulaic adventure. It is at this critical moment one might turn to Christopher Nolan’s film
Inception.
The “Wake”: Progress without Certitude and Christopher Nolan’s Inception
Don’t lose yourself. Find Saito and bring him back.
Inception
Nolan’s Inception utilizes a formula similar to the texts discussed, only to invert it and
call into doubt the security of standardized metaphysics in a post-2008 world, where an illusion
of “American centrality,” its layers of economic and social fictions, stands glaringly exposed.
This illusion of centrality, as the film articulates, relies upon the cinema as one of the most
prominent media in the second half of the twentieth century. Nolan’s self-reflective text seeks to
blur the line between cosmopolitan dreams and crumbling constructions of Western subjectivity.
The film opens in what many spectators might recognize as a traditional Japanese room
which is, in truth, an eclectic mixture of antiquated and modern Japanese design. The first
several lines between Saito and his guards are spoken in Japanese. Therefore, from the opening
of the film, the audience is asked to draw connections between Saito and this exotic, Far Eastern
locale; importantly, it is intimated this heavy-handed dream has been created by Arthur, an
designer from America. This is also the place the spectator return to in one of the climactic
scenes. Nolan’s decision to open and close his film with an overly-aestheticized vision of
“Japan” is significant as embedded within the narratives of this space are years of fantasies that

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have forged the U.S.-Japan cultural relationship, embodied in Saito’s relationship with the
American protagonist, Dom Cobb.
Cobb’s initial ambition is not dissimilar from the cyberpunk protagonists. The suspense
in the early scenes at the Japanese castle arises from the fact Cobb is trying to extract a secret
from Saito’s unconscious, while Saito is depicted as always seemingly one step ahead. Cobb
insists, “I need to know my way around your thoughts… you need to completely let me in.” As
in the plots previously examined, the dreamer is in search of some hidden Truth, the next step in
a (simplified) dialectical progression. Yet “Japan” remains impenetrable, layered in deep
mystique. After Cobb manages to steal the secret from Saito’s safe within the dream, he realizes
it is actually a useless document with multiple key lines already redacted. Saito and Cobb
“awaken” from this literally deteriorating fantasy and Saito smiles confidently: “In my dream,
we play by my rules.” Indeed, in Nolan’s imaginary “Japan,” Cobb’s confidence is thwarted and
his style of extraction fails. The archipelago consequently reads as an embodiment of difference
based on an exciting, alternative paradigm, reminiscent of cyberpunk narratives.

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However, it is this gamesmanship which gradually binds Saito and Cobb. Historically,
the United States and Japan, through their global corporations, are understood as (in)famously
employing what cultural analyst Joseph Nye labels as “soft power.” The two predominant “soft
power superpowers,” especially in the years following the twilight of the Cold War, have each
appeared to rely on cultural products to spread their influence.

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To a significant degree, this

connects the two countries - as opposed to earlier styles of global influence perpetrated by “Old
Europe”; whereas “Old Europe” also plays a key role in assisting Cobb, partnership with Saito,

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and the “Japan” he appears to embody, is what ultimately exposes the dangerous artificiality of a
political system propped up predominantly by dreams.
In America, Hollywood and the television industry have been widely read as asserting
“American values” onto the presumed victims of the rest of the world. Japan, likewise, has been
interpreted as spreading a secretive dream-work with its wildly popular anime and video game
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exports.

On this subject, cultural scholar Koichi Iwabuchi notes, “‘Asia’ is (…) reconstructed

by the Japanese media industries, which are enchanted with the idea of the Japanese
orchestration of a pan-Asian entertainment project as a bounded capitalist space of ardent
consumer aspiration” (Iwabuchi, 106-107). The two cultures are generally viewed as controlling
the minds of a late capitalist globe, extracting information when necessary and planting ideas in
the minds of the dreamers they encounter.

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Cobb, in his initial meeting with Saito, gloats over

this skill: “I know how to search your mind and find your secrets. I know the tricks.”
Saito and Cobb are thus implicated in a “soft power” scheme emanating into
communities across the globe. After Cobb fails to extract any hidden Truth but, in the process,
demonstrates his skills, Saito decides to hire him to help plant an idea in someone else’s mind, in
exchange for a safe return to Cobb’s native “America.” The joint manipulation of Saito and Cobb
is first put on display in a basement in Mombasa, where they encounter a group of people who
hook themselves into artificial dreams because they rely on these fantasies as “the only way they
can dream anymore.” As with William Gibson’s division of dream extraction in “America”
(Laney’s company DatAmerica) from dream extraction in “Japan” (the Japanese company,
Paragon-Asia Dataflow), this battle for control over the new realm of fantasy is clearly waged
between the two “soft power superpowers.” Yet the resolution of the initial conflict between

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Saito and Cobb alerts the audience Inception is going to challenge pseudo-dialectical logic and
instead focus on the shared affliction of a late capitalism where illusion, through “soft power,”
overwhelms any signs of “reality” (in either culture).
Following the opening merger, the film turns its attention to how dream manipulation
works. Explaining it to his future team member, Ariadne, Cobb explains: “In a dream, we create
and perceive our world simultaneously. And our mind does this so well we don’t even know it’s
happening. This allows us to get right in the middle of that process… by taking over the creating
part.” Nolan overtly references the act of making movies, implicating the cinema as a prominent
version of dream-manipulation.

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Cobb delights in the process of creating dreams: “The chance

to build cathedrals, entire cities, things that never existed, things that couldn’t exist in reality.”
One is of reminded of the elaborate sequences Nolan himself orchestrates for the film. Works
previously directed by Nolan, from Memento to The Prestige as well as the Batman films, exploit
comparable self-reflexive tropes, exploring the complexity of creating fantasies for a mass
audience.

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Another technique linking Cobb to Nolan as dream-manipulator is the ability to

splice together episodes (shot-to-shot editing) and exploit the audience’s willingness, in a quote
from Saito, to “take a leap of faith.” Cobb draws the viewer’s attention to the detail that they,
like Ariadne, have elected not to pause and ask how they have been moved from one scene to the
next. Cobb then emphatically asks her: “How did we end up here?” At this moment, audience
members too are startled and invited to question how Nolan’s dream-manipulation functions as
well as, more pointedly, how film-goers are exploited by the cinematic tools of cultural
imperialists perceived to be at work in America and Japan.

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This manipulative design augments through multiple allusions to “soft imperialism.” The
process of dream-sharing was, as Cobb’s sidekick Arthur states, initiated by an industrial
military complex, suggestively reminding one of the Marshall Plan and the spread of “American
values” via cultural exports.

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At another point in the film, Cobb discusses dream-manipulation

with his team member, Eames. Eames, a team-member who is British, gives the American a few
tips about his previous failures to plant ideas successfully into a subject’s mind before the
backdrop of Mombasa, a former British colony. Colonization therefore underlies the concept of
dream-work, making it plausible to implicate not only the cultural imperialism of the Pacific
powers but also the European empires from which they inherited the trade.
The demographic of the film’s characters, symptomatic of an expansionist vision, is
diverse, ranging from Cobb’s wife, Mal (France) to Cobb’s father, Miles (British) and the
group’s druggist, Yusuf (Indian). The mise-en-scene shifts with regularity, taking the viewer
through a kaleidoscope of worldly ports. The vision of the film is cosmopolitan at its most
ubiquitous, allowing the viewer an imagined freedom to access not only the locale of other
peoples but their innermost thoughts and dreams as well. Standardized metaphysics reaches
grandiose heights, affording the protagonist an incredible level of personal extension. Meanwhile,
something rings false in the film: the locales are too perfect, too much like what one might
expect from classical Hollywood. “Old Europe,” much like “New Japan,” is sterilized by its
sentimental construction. Very likely everything stems from Cobb’s singular imagination. This
illusion of worldliness only further pushes viewers to interrogate the veracity of the film’s
diegetic foundation, to distinguish the supposed universal from Cobb’s particularity.
As if to confirm these initial doubts, early in the plot Saito is gravely wounded, shot
during a chase scene in which their target’s subconscious rises up violently against them. Saito’s
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vulnerability suggests a damaged condition beneath the façade, indicating there is something
rotten within the cultural imperialist project. He and Cobb are suddenly entrenched together in a
heavily sedated dream-world, a realm so reliant on fantasy that dreams have begun to pile up
precariously. If Saito dies in the dream, he will be sent spiraling into limbo. Throughout the
remainder of the film, Saito is depicted as dying, coughing up bright red splotches to remind the
audience of his fatal condition. To contextualize this allusion, one might consider Japan’s selfproclaimed “lost decade” (the 1990s); from this period until today, the country has remained in
free-fall, it’s once booming economy having burst with disastrous consequences. The fantasies
elsewhere depicted as comprising “Japan’s essence” are simultaneously coded as a symbolic
death in the film. Saito’s body is threatened by demise, viewed in a constant state of “wake,”
haunting the film and supplying a good deal of its exigency. What has “Japan” become, the film
suggests, if not a victim to its surfeit of consumer fantasies, its copious number of cinematic
dreams modeled after a particular Western apparatus?
The narrative structure of Inception returns to the trope common in recent representations
of “Japan” analyzed earlier. The Western dreamer (Cobb) is mythologized as ultimately
“waking” from this disturbing late capitalist nightmare. Nevertheless, before seemingly exiting
the dream, the subject, confident in his ability to navigate this uncertain terrain, returns to save
Saito; Ariadne re-assures another team member that Cobb will, in the end, emerge from the
adventure unscathed. Indeed, as she returns to what one assumes to be “reality,” and Cobb
remains in the dream to seek his Japanese employer, Ariadne yells out: “Don’t lose yourself.
Find Saito and bring him back.” The audience is provoked into believing that Cobb, though
deeply troubled, has moved beyond anxiety and is focused on saving the rest of the world from
the dreams he initially forced upon them. This assurance is also a theme from cyberpunk
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recognized by David Porush: “(Cyberpunk authors) document and instruct us how to preserve
our humanity in the face of and in wonderment of and in spite of awesome technologies that
seem to sacrifice us to these technologized systems of the Code” (Porush, 247, emphasis mine).
Saito, once again linked to a highly stylized version of the archipelago, is identified as a
victim waiting to be rescued by an American hero who – initially, at least – seems to possess a
secure grip on the difference between reality and contrived dreams. Re-energized, Cobb returns
to Saito’s castle, where the Japanese tycoon has transformed into a withered old man. Cobb
announces, with hushed bravado, “I’ve come back for you. To remind you – of something.
Something you once knew. That this world is not real. Come back – so we can be young men
together again. Come back with me.” The limbo comprising Saito’s world is seemingly
transcended by a self-certain protagonist. Following the 2008 economic collapse, the film seems
to insinuate, the American position vis-à-vis Cobb is, rather absurdly, that only “America” can
save the world from the nightmare it is largely guilty of creating in the first place.
But Inception does not end with the certitude one locates in this formula. The ending,
which attracted a great deal of attention upon the film’s release, appears decidedly uncertain,
raising the distinct possibility that the entire narrative has itself been only a dream. Plausibly, it
was never Saito but actually Cobb himself lost in limbo. The film ends shortly after Cobb
appears to have rescued Saito; consequently, Cobb is allowed to depart for “America.” He
embraces his two children once again, in the idyllic sphere of his rural home, re-united in a
Utopian moment of bliss. His apparent origin is established as a domesticated, agrarian vision of
“America.” However, the metal top, a totem used throughout the film to indicate for Cobb
whether or not he is actually in a dream, still spins on the table, leaving the audience to wonder

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whether or not Cobb has really returned at all or if he is, in fact, still mired in fantasies of his
own making.
Evidence the entire film has been a dream is most provocatively revealed in the opening
sequences, once again set in “Japan.” After “waking” from the dream in which he fails to deceive
Saito, Cobb tells his team that he is “getting off at Kyoto,” where it will be “every man for
himself.” Kyoto, the Japanese emblem of an “authentic” Japan according to its self-marketing,
which strives to portray the city as offering a nostalgic return to a time of purity in the country,
presumably offers a respite from the weary superficiality, and untrustworthiness, of dreammanipulation. Yet the proceeding shot is a panoramic of Tokyo and its recognizable sprawl, a
city, in stark contrast to Kyoto, full of late capitalist excess. Cobb’s inquiry reverberates with the
long shot: “How did we get here?” An authoritative cut in the film moves the spectator
inexplicably from the “authentic” Kyoto, which one never actually visualizes, into the massive
cityscape of Tokyo. Is it possible that Cobb’s dreams, ever tied intimately to the late capitalist
project, will not allow him such a retreat? Has the idea of global corporations infected his mind
to such a degree that he can no longer fantasize about anything else? His dreams are seemingly
dictated both by the conglomerates initially hired him to do their work and, by extension, Nolan
and the authority granted him by the business of cinema. It is not his individual consciousness,
his personal “reaching autonomy,” that seeks but the artificial consciousness of a corporation
working through him.
The demise of “Old Europe,” embodied by Mal’s suicide, truly disturbs Cobb; her
preservation in the gilded tomb of his unconscious repeatedly casts him into traumatic self-doubt.
She tells him, “The world is not real. A simple little thought that changes everything. So certain
of your world, of what’s real.” She goes on to ask, “No creeping doubts? Not feeling persecuted
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on? Being chased around the globe by anonymous corporations?” Mal serves as the mouth-piece
for his anxiety, the instability of his handle over the dream. Her marked identity as French only
further strengthens the perceived crisis, summoning the ghost of Jean-Paul Sartre and the
existentialists. In fact, the spectator learns the totem which is the symbol of Cobb’s uncertainty
has not always belonged to him – before her death, it belonged to Mal. The teetering moment is
consequently further destabilized as the object he relies upon originally designated the dreams of
another. Her presence over the course of the film forces him to contemplate that the fantasy
design has - at last - slipped entirely from his grasp. Nostalgia, his aesthetic rooms and stylized
memories, cannot hide the possibility that “Old Europe” is actually dead and Cobb has been
viewing it in “wake” for some time. Even more unsavory is the revelation Cobb himself is to
blame for Mal’s death and the injection of “American dreams” into a post-war world was
actually fatal for the entire globe – including possibly, in the end, for Cobb himself.
The tragedy (or farce) of Cobb - as Gibson only begins to articulate in Idoru – is that
amidst the crisis of a hyper-virtual world, where global dreams have gone awry, his dream
structures have exceeded his capacity to contain them. He has fallen victim to the addiction he
has been spreading across the globe, even injecting into his wife. Like the victims in the
Mombasa basement, Cobb can no longer tell the difference between what is “real” and what is
“fantasy,” if, in truth, he ever could. Unlike Laney in Gibson’s novel, Cobb is not wiser because
of this nor is there any idealized synthesis to be found for the viewer. Instead, one leaves Cobb
unaware of his individual status, just as the audience finds itself having progressed to nothing
more than a stand-still. Inception urges the audience to grow skeptical toward the certainty of the
protagonist and the act of dream-manipulation employed by “soft power superpowers” such as
the U.S. and Japan. While less radical patterns such as cyberpunk, dismissed by David
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Kaufmann as “yuppie postmodernism,” are eventually undermined at their focal point, Nolan’s
uncertainty remains. This concept is captured beautifully by the camera’s lingering gaze upon
Cobb’s spinning totem. The initial dream, the raid of Saito’s castle, and the return through
standardized metaphysics are each granted as open-ended possibilities; each “waking” is reinvigorated by potential, an auto-deconstruction or negative dialectics challenging the assumed
grounding for the narrative as a whole.
Viewers of Inception who at first appear to be moving through myth inevitably arrive
right back at myth. Horkheimer and Adorno recognize this as a major shift within the capitalist
project: “The principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition, that the
Enlightenment upholds again mythic imagination, is the principle of myth itself” (Horkheimer,
45, emphasis mine). The essential difference is that this time Nolan’s viewer has an opportunity
to spot the “sleight of hand.” She finds no resolution in passing through a dream “Japan” and
returning to “America”; rather, she is given pause to wonder whether this exercise has been
founded on nothing more than mythical masonry. One discovers dream-work constructs not only
the existence of an imaginary “Japan” but the existence of a self-certain Western dreamer,
seemingly obliterating cultural difference: what is “Old Europe”? “Japan? The so-called “Third
World”? In the end, they appear static, imported furniture of the mind. As Cobb’s subjectivity
manifests itself, objectified upon celluloid, what is unveiled beneath the dream is a zero sum
game, empty rituals of narrative (re)simulating themselves ad nauseum. Exotic “Japan” begets
re-created James Bond scenarios begets the melodrama of family (and so on). Kristeva contends
this reveals a deeper psychological condition in a globalized society: “Deprived of rest, without
conclusion, ‘cosmopolitan’ – the sense of a permanent shattering” (Kristeva, 167). The
cosmopolitan Gothic once again disturbs the audience by transforming the familiar into the
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dreadfully unfamiliar and, perhaps of even greater consequence, the unfamiliar exposes itself as
having been within our gates all along.
The “wake,” designated by Nolan as a liminal space in which the spectator moves from
the remnants of life toward a sense of closure, is re-constituted through the layers of Inception.
The word “wake” and the concepts attached are double-edged. The audience must choose if they
are going to believe the endearing final image of a family (a domesticated “America”) or
acknowledge a heavy presence which looms over all – Death, the unconscious, a moment of
mastery refused. At a time in which rituals such as cinematic dreams have displaced the
participant from a position of centrality, subjectivity remains in a perpetual state of “wake.” The
film has not been a “wake” for Saito alone; it has been a “wake” for Cobb (and the audience) as
well.
Previously, in The Matrix, the act of “waking” is presumed to be productive,
transcendence a given; in Inception, on the other hand, the viewer does not transcend but rather
negates. Cobb does not choose to “wake up” like Mal but refuses to admit it was ever actually
his dream in the first place. The audience consequently grows detached from him over the course
of the film, viewing him skeptically from above (whereas the viewer of The Matrix almost
exclusively shares in the revelations of Neo). For the audience, there can be little satisfaction in
Cobb’s final choice. To “wake” is to die. One must be killed to experience the kick, but it is a
shallow death, always preceded by the guarantees of a return; Death, like transcendence,
develops into a mere given. However, by the close of the film, the kicks, “wakings” synonymous
with a predictable and choreographed death, have lost all conviction. Gone are the pseudodialectics of cyberpunk, in which difference is projected and then overcome; gone is the shadow
of Heidegger’s comforting re-encounter with the positivism of Being. In its place is an ever212

terrifying Hegelian negation and a sense of previously-buried doubt. What if the re-assurances,
the narrative structures guiding Western thought in an age of rampant consumption, and dictating
the majority of cinematic formulas since the early twentieth century, have been based on myth?
What if there are no re-assuring cultural determinism in global politics, no terra firma in a
hidden agrarian “America”?
The “wake” in Inception thus re-establishes negative dialectics as a framework for an
uncertain age. The film, instead of confronting “Japan” in a confident fashion, refuses to settle on
any conclusive Truth. Perhaps Cobb has chosen the most re-assuring route, as he does in his
traversing of “Old Europe” and “Japan”: the route of nostalgia.

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The film, nonetheless, will not

labor to break down this problem further, as that would provide another resolution, neutralizing
the freedom Nolan privileges. The dénouement of Inception insists the fruitfulness of doubt must
re-emerge in cinematic works and, more generally, in Western constructs of cultural difference.
As Adorno writes, “Disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of philosophy. It keeps it from
growing rampant and becoming an absolute to itself” (Adorno, 13). The turn from “wake” (as a
pseudo-dialectical verb) to “wake” (as a revelatory event) is essential in understanding Nolan’s
post-2008 vision for a cinematic medium refusing to be an “absolute to itself.” His film forces
dreamers, at the dawning of theatre lights, to contemplate what may have been a “wake” for the
Western-centric myths defining them. And once again, at the epicenter of this revelation, rests a
spectral vision of “Japan.”
*****************
I conclude this dissertation with Inception as what is at stake in the film nicely
summarizes what I believe to be at stake in many fantastic renderings of “Japan”: how the

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persistent destabilizing of the “East/West” binary can avoid “bad relativism” on one hand and
stagnant reification on the other. This reminds one of the tensions highlighted in the introduction
between the attitudes toward Gothicism Khair and Edmundson exhibit, positions I suggest the
cosmopolitan Gothic should ideally hold in balance. How then is one to depart from this
ambivalence? What, if anything, should serve as a resolution? To answer, one might turn to
Judith Butler’s recent study of power, in which she reconsiders Hegel’s “unhappy
consciousness,” and discover a complimentary description of the phenomenon I have been
examining:
The temporal paradox of the subject is such that, of necessity, we must lose the
perspective of a subject already formed in order to account for our own becoming. That
becoming is no simple or continuous affair, but an uneasy practice of repetition and its
risks, compelled yet incomplete, wavering on the horizon of social becoming. (Butler, 30)
Underlying the texts examined by this dissertation are a number of far-reaching
dialectical energies, including structuralism/post-structuralism, male/female, constructs of
“race”/constructs of “culture,” ethnography/autoethnography, and - most pressingly for this
project’s purpose – “U.S./Japan.” Gothic devices, with various levels of success, attempt to make
meaning out of these dualisms. In the end, I still wonder what to make of the dynamic between
Cobb and Saito. Unresolved, I am left to shift my attention away from the ends and more
towards the process itself. After all, to resolve some artificial binary between “East” and “West”
would be illusory; instead, one might focus on allure of specters and what that reveals to us about
a particular cosmopolitan vision. These hauntings, from the shadows of Hearn to the roar of
Godzilla, from the doubles of Eaton to the invasion of gremlins, share a refusal of satisfying
closure.
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I would like to end with the lingering top still spinning and the inquiries resonant. Can
delusions of a “supernatural Japan” be overcome by a metaphysical return? Does the problem of
Cobb’s system contain, within itself, the solution? These questions are paramount and not readily
answered. In his recent extensive study on the history of dialectical thought, Jameson offers a
warning: “The consumption of Hollywood film form is the apprenticeship to a specific culture,
to an everyday life as a cultural practice… if (America) can imagine nothing else then obviously
we have nothing to warn other cultures about either” (Jameson 2009a, 443). Earlier, Herbert
Marcuse, one of Adorno’s colleagues in the Frankfurt School, re-frames the dialectic in a fashion
that posits a solution to Jameson’s point:
Self-consciousness thus finds itself in a “state of desire”… man, awakened to selfconsciousness, desires the objects around him, appropriates and uses them. But in the
process he comes to feel that the objects are not the true end of his desire, but that his
needs can be fulfilled through association with other individuals… in dealing with these
objects, man is actually dealing with man. (Marcuse, 114 emphasis mine)
The cosmopolitan Gothic pushes one to recognize emptiness and loneliness in the haunted echo
chambers of a Western-centric world perspective. If Cobb’s final stance is the most satisfying he
has to offer, and yet it is still part and parcel of the manipulative dream-scape, might one step
back, face these specters with a critical eye, and make room for a negotiable future based on
association not with supernatural projections, but with “other individuals”?

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Notes

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NOTES
1

Historian George Feifer describes the event in vivid detail: “A spectacular comet, or meteor,
appealed to the Americans even more. Appearing at midnight, it threw hours of spectral light on
the ships from its blue and red fireball, listing spirits with a promise of a favorable omen” (Feifer,
105).
2

See also Christopher Benfey’s The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and
the Opening of Old Japan (New York: Random House, 2004).
3

This term is borrowed from William Hosley’s The Japan Idea: Art and Life in Victorian
America (Hartford, Connecticut: Wadsworth Atheneum Shop, 1990).
4

For more, see Linda Gertner Zatlin’s Beardsley, Japonisme, and the Perversion of the
Victorian Ideal (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
5

Though Sime never formally studied Japanese art, he (like most Western consumers)
demonstrated a great affinity for it. To mark a historic occasion in his life, Sime’s friends
bestowed upon him a traditional Japanese screen “tailored to his tastes” (Heneage and Ford, 22).
6

For more on similar representations, see John Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race and Power in
the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1987).
7

Another example is the work of science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, in particular Sixth
Column (1949), a novel focusing upon a demonic army of PanAsians mercilessly invading the
West.
8

The adaptation of Japanese ghost stories is a long-standing tradition, ranging from Percival
Lowell in the late nineteenth century on to the Baron Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, F.
Hadland Davis, and more recently Royall Tyler.
9

See also The Japanese Nation in Evolution (1907), in which Griffis states: “Japanese history…
belongs neither to the chimney of Santa Claus, nor to the nursery’s fairyland… (the Japanese
person) has as much right to serious attention and the benefit of truth stripped of its nursery garb,
as has the European” (Griffis 1907, 24).
10

In one of the few extended studies concerning Griffis, Edward R. Beauchamp summarizes the
traits which make Griffis such a complex figure: “his long-term commitment to doing the work
of God, improving his financial status, and using his literary talents to secure a reputation for
himself” (Beauchamp, 24).

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11

See also Griffis’ historical novel Honda the Samurai (1890). In this work, a narrator
frequently weaves a story-within-a-story in order to cover as much of Japan’s “real” and
“imaginary” history. In one such case, the hand-off is so subtle the reader becomes aware of how
unclear the binary really is: “I have traveled with them in the rice-lands of history; now you can
lead them over the moorland of fable and fairy tale” (Griffis 1890, 131 – 132).
12

For an explicit survey of this tradition, see Jack Hunter’s Dream Specters: Extreme Ukiyo-e:
Sex, Blood, and the Supernatural (Tokyo: Shinbaku Books, 2010).
13

For those interested in further analysis of “the yellow peril,” see Gary Hoppenstand’s “Yellow
Devil Doctors and Opium Dens: A Survey of the Yellow Peril Stereotypes in Mass Media
Entertainment,” from The Popular Culture Reader--Third Edition. Eds. Christopher D. Geist
and Jack Nachbar (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1983).
14

Margaret L. Carter’s Specter or Delusion?: The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction (1987) further
analyzes this critical turn. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, she posits, there is a debate
as to whether or not the supernatural truly exists and hence the Gothic retains a hint of veracity.
On the other hand, “For the average twentieth century reader, the supernatural is not problematic;
it is apt to be rejected without debate” (Carter, 120). The Jamesian move exposes that specters
are always-already delusions; their appearance exposes nothing but faulty wiring in the modern
consciousness.
15

Twain regularly experimented with perversity and the macabre, even in dry, satirical
travelogues such as The Innocents Abroad (1869). Once Twain’s narrator arrives in Italy, his
cool and collected manner shows signs of disruption. Exposure to a preserved corpse in the
underground stirs a return of the narrator’s long-repressed memory: “It is hard to forget repulsive
things” (Twain 1966, 126). The narrator veers from the original narrative into an exposition of
the haunting recollection of how he, as a boy, discovered a mutilated corpse (an episode
speaking loudly to a darker dimension of the narrator’s state of mind): “I went away from there. I
do not say that I went away in any sort of hurry, but I simply went – that is sufficient… I have
slept in the same room with him often since then – in my dreams” (127). In the face of Death, the
boundary between nations, between the Self and the Other, and within the psychology of the
traveler is transgressed. Later in Italy, the narrator, who meets with an American soldier looking
for “bloodless adventure,” contemplates the shallowness of cosmopolitan perspectives by
unearthing the “bloodiness” within himself and his nation’s history. Discussing the romantic
portrayal of Indians, the narrator scoffs at the concept: “I have roamed with them, scalped them,
had them for breakfast. I would gladly eat the whole race if I had a chance. But I am growing
unreliable” (147). Episodes such as these, of which there are plenty in Twain’s travel writing,
provide Gothic sensations. Through encounters with the “foreignness” of the rest of the globe,
characters are forced to re-encounter the unsavory “foreignness” buried deep within the
individual, and national, consciousness.
16

One might also look to Cram’s collection of ghostly tales, Black Spirits and White (1895),
which also intermingles a cosmopolitan vision of the Orient with Gothic sensations. In “No. 252
218

Rue M. Le Prince,” Cram tells the story of a wandering Bostonian who encounters a series of
disturbing rooms tied to a sublime Far East and a pseudo-Buddhist esotericism before being
attacked by a malignant force. One young man, who has “rather hobbledehoy tendencies towards
Buddhism,” cannot hope to contain the power contained in these spaces, including the room “like
the inside of an enormous Japanese box, and about as empty” (Cram 2010, 17).
17

For a seminal study of the subject, see Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel
(London: Dalkey Archive, 1998).
18

For an example of sustained repulsion, see Henry Adams’ Letters from Japan (1886). He
writes: “Japan possesses one persuasive, universal, substantive smell – an oily, sickish, slightly
fetid odor – which underlies all things, and though infinitely varied, is always the same” (Adams,
12).
19

Scholars Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison explain the Gothic genre as follows:
“While part of us is appalled by its excesses and outrages, another part gleefully identifies with
its rebellion against social, sexual, and moral codes” (Magistrale and Morrison, 4).
20

Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, for example, intermingled racial determinism within his tales,
finding in Poe as well as Hearn an “archaic and Orientalised style with jeweled phrase”
(Lovecraft, 57).
21

The cosmopolitan Gothic thus shares critical space with “planetary modernism,” especially as
it is defined by Susan Stanford Friedman: it de-stabilizes any notion of centrality without losing
the mutual fears and comforts that are shared by cultures all across the globe. As Friedman notes,
“A planetary aesthetics of modernism needs to be transformative rather than merely additive”
(Friedman, 487 emphasis mine).
22

Recent scholarship by David Weir locates a similar stress on the global/local distinction. He
coins the phrase “American Orient” to maintain the prevalence of fantasy at the core of the
transnational relationship: “The East became not so much terra incognita, as the old maps had it,
but terra fantastica… I wish my oxymoronic phrase ‘American Orient’ to be understood: as a
version and a vision of the East that can be apprehended only through the distorted lens of the
Western eye” (Weir, 2).
23

To modify Arjun Appadurai’s well-worn phrase, one might also deem this “Gothicism-atlarge”: recurrent reactions against modernization that appear in different communities at
different times.
24

For further example of this phenomenon, see Jack London’s stories from Hawaii, such as
“Koolau the Leper.” Hawaii, in many of London’s renditions, is a repulsive space for travellers
of “New England stock.” The natives serve as grotesque projections of everything the Puritanical
visitors are not: carefree, passionate, one with Death. In “Koolau,” London provides length
descriptions of bizarre rituals, including a “dance of the living dead” (London, 43). Yet, at the
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same time Koolau, king of the lepers, who resists the foreigners trying to remove him from his
land, offers a site of abjection, he also provides a heroic (if not entirely “noble”) savage; London
pushes the reader to identify Koolau as an unfamiliar Other and, simultaneously, as intimately
familiar in a united fight for sovereignty.
25

See Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
26

This dissertation is haunted by the contributions of Japanese individuals, refusing to envision
it as a solely one-way phenomenon. For example, one must acknowledge Hearn’s wife and
students as translators and cultural ambassadors. One must likewise recognize the inspiration
derived from numerous Japanese film directors and the important vocalization of Ishiguro
Shintaro and Akio Morita with their (in)famous “No” to ieru Nihon (The Japan that Can Say No,
1989). This is therefore predominantly, but never exclusively, a Western-centric fantasy.
27

Previous paradigms include the veritable cottage industry of travelogues concerning
individuals who go on a pilgrimage to Japan to “re-connect” with themselves. In these narratives,
there are frequent revisions of previously held stereotypes concerning national identity yet the
stories almost always end with a return to certainty, a transcendence of earlier positions. For two
examples of these innumerable travelogues, see Pico Iyer’s The Lady and the Monk: Four
Seasons in Kyoto (1992) as well as Cathy N. Davidson’s 36 Views of Mt. Fuji: On Finding
Myself in Japan (1993). The cosmopolitan Gothic texts examined in this dissertation refuse final
stasis.
28

At the fin-de-siecle, this phenomenon was described by Mary Crawford Fraser as “cherryblossom metaphysics” [Fraser, M. A Diplomat’s Wife in Japan: Sketches at the Turn of the
Century (New York: John Weatherhill Inc., 1922), p. 159].
29

Spencer’s followers share similar disagreements over the fundamental outline of “progress.”
Some were like Fenollosa, such as the wildly-popular Reverend Henry Beecher Stowe, in their
optimism regarding the promises of Western civilization; others, like Thomas Huxley, were more
akin to Hearn’s Romantic subservience to the great “Unknown.” For more on these disparities,
see Werth Barry Werth’s Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, The Gilded Age, and the
Triumph of Evolution in America (New York: Random House, 2009).
30

Hearn and Fenollosa’s texts navigate a fragile line at the turn of the century between
ethnography (a self-certain stretching of knowledge concerning the globe) and auto-ethnography
(a critical turn back upon the Self, recognition of the doubts haunting observers). For an
interesting parallel across the Atlantic, see Jed Esty’s A Shrinking Island: Modernism and
National Culture in England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
31

David Punter illustrates a similar ambivalence in the Romantic poetry of Lord Byron: “There
is a sense of aristocratic nostalgia which sits uneasily with the political radicalism.” This
conflicted construction is thus hardly novel, having been fostered from the early eighteenth
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century onward [Punter, D. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions (New York:
Longman Group, 1980), p. 109].
32

Hearn’s proto-modernism is widely acknowledged by scholars interested in his work. George
Hughes, for one, points out Hearn’s emphasis on “relativism” and states, “He enriches modern
culture precisely because he also disturbs those centres of gravity we like to consider fixed”
(George Hughes, “Lafcadio Hearn and the Fin De Siecle,” from Re-Discovering Lafcadio Hearn.
Ed. Sukehiro Hirakawa (Kent, UK: Global Books, 1997), p. 101. Elsewhere, noted Japanese
scholar Donald Richie locates a significant stylistic shift in Hearn’s prose, echoing the stylistic
turn of many other authors into what would come to be labeled as modernism: “Simplicity…
after the heightened, the complicated, the curious, Hearn had learned from Japan itself the virtues
of the spare” (Donald Richie, Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan (Rutland, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 1997), p.
15.
33

Brad Evans labels this phenomenon as the “ethnographic imagination”: “the experimentation,
sometimes serious but often in the form of aesthetic dalliance, with new ways of perceiving,
representing, and producing structures of affiliation and difference” [Evans, B. Before Cultures:
The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865 – 1920 (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), p. 7]. The “dalliances” of Hearn and Fenollosa negotiate the borders of
perception in similar ways.
34

This chapter will depart from Barbara Hayley’s comparative essay “Lafcadio Hearn, W.B.
Yeats and Japan,” concerning W.B. Yeats (the “modernist”) and Hearn (the “idealist”), in so far
as it takes up the issues I attend to here. However, Hayley’s argument neglects several key points.
First, she dramatically mis-reads Hearn’s prose, overlooking its minimalist quality, its incessant
emphasis on what is absent, as well as contending Hearn draws satisfaction from a merging of
the “human” and the “Divine” (a trait far more accurately applied to Fenollosa). She writes, “If
there is grandeur in Yeats’s unfulfilled reaching is there not also a magnificence in Hearn’s sense
of arrival?” (Hayley, 60). Second, and even more important, Hayley’s desire to retain divisions
between these two artists fails to recognize the complexity of the task at hand. In fact, perhaps
symptomatic of the transitional moment between the late Romantics and the early modernists,
there is always uneasiness between the so-called “arrival” and the limits of consciousness which
make such “arrival” both impossible and always with us.
35

As Judith Snodgrass notes, “Fenollosa led the campaign testifying to the universal value of
Japanese art from the perspective of, and in the vocabulary of, Western aesthetics” (Judith
Snodgrass. Presenting Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian
Exposition (Raleigh, NC: University of North Caroline Press, 2003).
36

It is important to note here that their mutual idol Spencer was also unable to resolve the
question of the “Unknowable”; as Mark Francis has argued, Spencer was “eclectic on
metaphysics” and his philosophy “always contained much uncertainty.”

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37

Even prior to Pound’s influence, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry
expresses a dissatisfaction with Western discourse: “A late stage of decay is arrested and
embalmed in the dictionary… it is impossible to represent change in this system or any kind of
growth” (Fenollosa 2008, 55 - 57).Yet, it must be recognized in surveying the drafts of this piece,
Pound’s editing of Fenollosa’s manuscript did much to condense the argument and to provide the
“flavor” of minimalism and early modernist styling. Haun Saussy’s preface to the recent rerelease of CWCMP states: “Pound contributed to the Americanizing of the essay, even as he
Poundified it” (24).
38

Jameson provides a concise summation of the Hegelian project against traditional
philosophical discourse: “It does not, turgidly and laboriously, attempt to expound some idea
which the reader then attempts, by retracing the steps of the argument, to recreate and thus to
grasp or ‘understand’… Better still, (Hegel’s) Logic is like a piece of music, and its text a score,
which we must ourselves mentally perform (and even orchestrate)” (Jameson 2008, 80 emphasis
mine). In Fenollosa’s most famous essay, language does not situate an end-in-itself but suggests
a ceaseless process of Becoming in which penultimate comprehension is nothing but an illusion.
40

For more on Hearn’s early life and experiences with religion see Jonathan Cott’s Wandering
Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Kodansha International, 1992), Edward
Tinker’s Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1924), and O.W.
Frost’s Young Hearn (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1958).
41

Biographer Paul Murray states, “(Hearn) was unable to reconcile the notion of the
unspeakable horror of ghosts with that of holiness” (Murray, 247).
42

Hearn only begins to approach the critical cosmopolitanism later posited by theorist Paul
Rabinow, “an understanding suspicious of its own imperial tendencies” (Rabinow, 258).
43

For more on Hearn’s relationship with his Irish ancestry, and his link to the work of Yeats and
the Irish renaissance, see Paul Murray’s evocative work, A Fantastic Journey: The Life and
Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (1997).
44

The unsettled nature of Hearn’s project, in particular, is articulated by Murray: “Hearn was
able to see through, and dismiss, contemporary Western imperialism but he was unable to break
free of its philosophical constraints” (Murray, 124).
45

One might also consider Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City for an interesting
parallel. The “uneven” development is explained as follows: “The pull of the idea of the country
is towards old ways, human ways, natural ways. The pull of the idea of the city is towards
progress, modernisation, development. In what is then a tension, a present experienced as tension,
we use the contrast of country and city to ratify an unresolved division and conflict of impulses,
which it might be better to face on its own terms… the point of saying this is not to disprove or
devalue either kind of feeling. It is to see the real change that is being written about, as we
222

discern its common process. For what is at issue, in all these cases, is a growth and alteration of
consciousness” (Williams, 297 emphasis mine). “Japan,” it could be said, represents an
amalgamation of country and city, and all of the impulses Williams illustrates therein. My task in
this first chapter is therefore not to deride the practice of Hearn or Fenollosa but to recognize
“Japan” as a fictive site upon which these dual impulses find their deposit, in order to advocate
facing these modes of representation “on their own terms.”
46

Sidney McCall writes in her preface to Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, “The influence
of Hegel remained with (Fenollosa) a vital and constructive factor throughout his life” (Fenollosa
2007, xiii).
47

For more on the Fenollosa’s joint ventures, see Larry Chisolm’s Fenollosa: The Far East and
American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963).
48

See also Van Wyck Brooks’ Fenollosa and His Circle (1961).

49

Though she was not a formal member of the St. Louis or Concord schools active at that time,
McCall did share many of their goals as well as their uncertainties. See Dorothy G. Rogers’
America’s First Woman Philosophers: Transplanting Hegel 1860 - 1925 (NY: Continuum. 2005).
50

Georg W.F. Hegel writes, “the real subject-matter is not exhausted in its purpose, but in
working the matter out” (Hegel, 12). “Spirit,” according to Hegel, resists “edifying” and instead
finds its nature in dialectical Becoming.
51

See once more Christopher Benfrey’s The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese
Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan.
52

For further analysis of the dialectical forces at work in Japanology, see Robert A.
Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1991).
53

For more on Hearn’s evolving style, see Carl Dawson, Lafcadio Hearn and the Vision of
Japan (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
54

The aspects of Eastern religion projected onto this “Ghost” can be expressed in the following
statement from Judith Snodgrass: “(Buddhism) would provide the competition with Christianity
that was essential if the West was to reach its full evolutionary potential” (Snodgrass, 151).
According to many thinkers during this era, the “Ghost” of Japan would unnerve the early
twentieth century Christian but in so doing it would force them to become “better Christians.”
55

For more on this anxiety, see also Thomas Tweed’s The American Encounter with Buddhism,
1844 - 1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North
Carolina Press, 2000). In addition, Christine Guth discusses the obsession (and repulsion) of
Americans to the Buddhist ritual of cremation: “Such images no doubt fueled fear and horror of a
practice that for many Christians brought to mind the fire and brimstone of hell” (Guth, 195).
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56

For Hegel, Reason is always repelling itself as a Thing outside of itself; this endless negation
is described in the Phenomenology as follows: “Spirit knows itself as spontaneously active in
face of them, and in singling out from them something for itself, it follows its own inclinations
and desires, making the object conform to it: in the first case it behaves negatively towards itself
as an individuality; in the second case, negatively towards itself as a universal being” (Hegel,
182).
57

One might return again to the work of Lukács to appreciate the limitations McCall emphasizes
within her prose. Against construction of a “beautiful Japan” taking place in the work of certain
figures engaging in Japonisme (mostly in the commercial sector), McCall reminds one that
artistic portrayals of “Japan,” as yet another trend in formal posturing (like Romanticism), must
ceaselessly meet their end-point and it is here, as Lukács contends, one finds the most “human”
expression possible. On playwright Richard Beer-Hoffmann, Lukács composes a passage I find
resonant when considering McCall’s work, without necessarily elevating her artistic skills to
those of Beer-Hoffmann: “Only behind these encounters do we perceive the eternal loneliness, as
vast as ever… his characters send out rays in all directions, but the roses cannot bridge the
precipices, and the rays of light are reflected only in mirrors… the edifice he has so beautifully
constructed breaks down at several points and sudden perspectives open up before us, sudden
glimpses of something – who knows what? Life? His own soul? … We cannot help loving these
moments in which Beer-Hoffmann the artist shows himself to be weaker than Beer-Hoffmann
the profound and authentic human being” (Lukács 2010, 144).
58

There is an interesting parallel between the form of McCall’s narratives and the form of
Hegel’s Phenomenology: “The importance of literature to the [Phenomenology’s] project,
however, is not one of static images, but rather of their movement and – as the allusion to the
paragraph at the work’s end suggests – the ways in which that movement can be ‘recollected’ or
held together as part of a narrative” (Speight, 16).
59

See once more Mari Yoshihara’s Embracing the East: White Women and American
Orientalism.
60

One might also consider here the popularity of Spiritualism within the suffragist movement
during the same time period, in which notions of “femininity” were linked to Death, or titillating
encounters with the deceased. These themes were prominent among female consumers and
authors during the era, conjoined in a “rebellion against authority.” Furthermore, “Death literally
occurred in woman’s sphere… (middle-class women) produced and purchased a variety of
memorial artifacts from postmortem photographs to jewelry woven from the hair of the
deceased.” The domestic sphere became, in other words, an assortment of artifacts marking both
the Far East as well as Death, creating an amalgamation in the name of liberation and bringing
concrete evidence of what was beyond Western male authority into the so-called “woman’s
world” (Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century
America [Boston: Beacon Press, 1989], 2; 53 emphasis mine).

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61

For more on the shifting definition of Female Gothic, as well as the critics of the term, see
Lauren Fitzgerald’s “Female Gothic and the Institutionalization of Gothic Studies.” Gothic
Studies 6, 1 ( 2004).
62

As an example, popular author Hallie Erminie Rives, at one time the wife of a diplomat
stationed in Japan, composed a novel which also flirted at times with “Japan” as a monstrous,
haunted locale: The Kingdom of Slender Swords. In it, the protagonist finds her long-lost father,
who has been making idols in a Japanese village. This paternal figure is coded as being none
other than Hearn himself. The father was born on a Mediterranean island, had a “bitter youth” in
England, took quests to West Indian cities, was blind in one eye, moved to New York City in his
late teens, and was hiding in Japan in order to “escape.” This character, whose life mirrors that of
Hearn in near precise detail, exists at the center of Rives’ novel, giving it an even greater air of
intrigue; this also demonstrates that Hearn would have been well-known enough at the time for
many educated readers to grasp the reference [Rives, Hallie Erminie. The Kingdom of Slender
Swords (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1910), 131]. In truth, this influence continues today. In
Japan, the director of Ringu, Nakata Hideo, is currently at work completing a film based on
Hearn’s life entitled Hearn; elsewhere, the bestselling author of the Tales of the Otori book
series, Gillian Rubinstein, writes under the pseudonym Lian Hearn. Her works deal with
Hearnian subject matter, including phantoms from “Old Japan.”
63

See also Michelle A. Masse’s In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
64

I refer here to mass-produced, formulaic Gothic narratives; a fair amount of Gothic fiction, in
particular works written by women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was far more
radical in nature. One might consider canonical figures such as the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth
Gaskell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Shelley, and Toni Morrison.
65

“A Were-wolf of the Campagna” tells the tale of mysterious were-wolf attacks in an Italian
village. The story, as with the works examined in this chapter, confronts the limitations of male
hegemony. The reader is led to suspect that the monster terrorizing the town is a “man-wolf”
with paws “larger than a man’s hand.” Yet Fraser provides a surprising twist at the conclusion: a
trembling house-wife is actually the beast. The “shocking” discovery takes place when the werewolf’s severed paw transforms into the wife’s dainty hand; what was once domestic and familiar
is rendered dreadfully unfamiliar: “There was something diabolically familiar about the hand. He
looked again and closer. There was something familiar about the ring, too. He had seen it
elsewhere and very lately… The end of the story (which I can only tell as it was told to me) is
that the woman was burnt as a witch” [Fraser, Mrs. Hugh. “A Were-wolf of the Campagna,”
from The Were-wolf Pack. Ed. Mark Valentine (Hertsfordshire, Britain: Wordsworth Editions
Limited, 2008), pp. 80 – 83].
66

Critic Huining Ouyang notes that Eaton’s fiction is “more than a charming piece of japonica,”
it “destabilizes orientalist binary constructions of race” [Huining Ouyang, “Ambivalent

225

Passages: Racial and Cultural Crossings in Onoto Watanna’s ‘The Heart of Hyacinth’.” MELUS
34, 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 211 – 229].
67

Eugenia C. DeLamotte comments, ‘In a world in which language itself defines women as the
fearful Other, the most revealing stories they tell about themselves are mysteries’ [Eugenia C.
DeLamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 291].
68

One may also locate this doubling in Eaton’s Me: A Book of Remembrance. In this tale, the
protagonist Nora looks to the modern girl Lolly, depending upon her to manifest every urge she
represses. Recognizing Lolly’s darker side, Nora admits: “I think you are trying to shock me.”
To which Lolly, not displeased by this revelation, replies: “They’re all afraid of me” (Watanna
1997, 134).
69

Even in her more romantic narratives, Eaton returns to the macabre. In A Japanese Blossom
(1906), for example, nothing at all seems to occur; the narrative is comprised not of events but
rather of letters and re-tellings. Nowhere does Eaton draw more attention to the textuality of her
texts, to the distance between the telling and the thing-itself. In the middle of the novel, the
characters attend the performance of a supernatural storyteller, an episode that does nothing to
further the plot but seems simply there for affect. The storyteller, with “chalky white face,” eyes
like “black chasms,” and “long fangs,” tells the tale of a wronged female ghost who returns to
decapitate her husband’s new lover. Then, with a theatrical flourish, the woman’s head appears
floating above the audience. The female spectators are “paralyzed with fear” and the female
protagonist admits, “I didn’t know I could feel quite so shivery over a mere ghost story.” Eaton
draws the reader’s attention here, perhaps more directly than anywhere else, to her authorial
designs and the reader gets to glimpse the effectiveness of ghostly, sensational tropes unleashed
upon an unwitting audience [Watanna, Onoto. A Japanese Blossom (New York: Dodo Press,
1906), 87 – 89].
70

Yuko Matsukawa, a scholar who has written extensively on Eaton’s life, describes her as a
“trickster” who enjoys “challenging our preconceptions of gender and race” [Yuko Matsukawa,
“Onoto Watanna’s Japanese Collaborators and Commentators.” The Japanese Journal of
American Studies No. 16 (2005), pp. 31 – 53].
71

In Tama (1910), a female Japanese fox-spirit bewitches a foreign teacher, the “Tojin-san.” A
variation of Hearn’s earlier adaptation of the traditional tale “Yuki no Onna” (Woman of the
Snow), this narrative follows the American teacher as he tames the woman and brings her back
to her “proper” place in society. Though she haunts the first half of the novel as a vampiric terror,
feeding off of her hapless victims (“the fox-woman slid down the bamboo trunk so swiftly and so
silently she was beside the terrified serving-maid before the latter knew. She felt her arms caught
in a sudden squeezing grip. Sharp fingers sank into her thick, fat flesh, crept up along her arms to
her shoulders, nipped at her breast, her neck, her cheeks… the fox-woman had again vanished”),
the sprite is quickly and efficiently brought into “decent” society by the Western patriarch (53).
The Tojin-san states:
226

It seems to me an amazing thing that to-day when you (Japanese) are frankly hoping to
join the nations of enlightenment, you still give yourselves up to barbarous persecution
because of what, after all, is nothing but a legend fit for children. (34)
Tama recapitulates the structures its antagonizing vamp initially disrupts [Watanna, Onoto. Tama
(New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1910)].
72

Philosopher Georges Bataille views this position as “an identity of opposites between glory
and dejection, between exalted and imperative (higher) forms and impoverished (lower) forms”
(Bataille 1985, 144 – 145).
73

For more, see Steve Ryfle’s extensive Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star: The Unauthorized
Biography of the “Big G” (Toronto: ECW Press, 1998).
74

See also K.K. Ruthven, Nuclear Criticism (Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press,
1993).
75

Maurice Blanchot composed the foremost celebration of the irreverence made possible by
imagining the nuclear event in The Writing of The Disaster. He famously glimpses the potential
to escape constrictive paradigms in Western philosophy: “It is the time when the negative falls
silent and when in place of men comes the infinite calm (the effervescence) which does not
embody itself or make itself intelligible” (Blanchot, 40).
76

For an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon, see Narrelle Morris’ Japan-Bashing: AntiJapanism Since the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 2011).
77

William Nester comments, “In its single-minded devotion to winning the Cold War with the
Soviet Union, Washington may have lost a much more difficult and subtle war with Japan”
(Nester, 398 emphasis mine).
78

Clyde V. Prestowitz asserts, in the face of the challenge posed by Japan: ‘The United States
must decide once more what kind of nation it wants to be’ (Prestowitz, 333).
79

For more on the interdependence of an imaginary “East/West” binary, see once more Naoki
Sakai’s Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism .
80

“The System” is visualized in a number of 1980s films directed by Ridley Scott, in particular
Black Rain (1989). In this film, an American cop, Nick (Michael Douglas), chases a yakuza
(gangster) through the underbelly of the archipelago. The antagonist, Sato (Yusaku Matsuda), is
a sadistic killer/counterfeiter with no sense of loyalty or respect. The nightmare world of Sato
remains in a perpetual cycle: like a press printing burnable bills, or a factory on auto-pilot, it
senselessly moves forward, shedding limbs with senseless abandon.
227

81

Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby (1967), in contrast, does not utilize Japanese companies
(and their employees) in these ways. Guy does commercials for explicitly American companies
(Pall Mall, Anacin); though an anonymous Japanese businessman does appear in the climactic
scene taking photos (it is the final line, in fact), the camera is deliberately loaded with film: “He
held up an open camera into which he was putting film” (Levin, 239). This Japanese character
thus seems more interested in learning from the capitalist pact than in exposing the fissure of the
symbolic as in Polanski’s film version.
82

Ambivalent representations of Japan’s Otherness (overlapping with an awareness of its
Sameness) have in fact – as explicated in the introduction - been a defining characteristic of the
cultural relationship between the U.S. and Japan since the 1850s. This trope may account for
postmodern monsters emerging in depictions of Japan, rather than countries such as China or
Korea; the emphasis on Sameness habitually applied to depictions of the archipelago possibly
laid the groundwork for the specter of Sameness emerging (again) in the 1980s.
83

Robert Heinlein’s Sixth Column (1949), referenced also in the introduction, suggests that a
degree of difference was forecasted prior to the so-called “miracle economy.” In the novel, the
protagonists are contemplating their enemy, the PanAsians: “The difference to him was one of
degree only. Looking at the PanAsians through Finny’s eyes there was nothing to hate; they were
simply more misguided souls whose excesses were deplorable” (Heinlein, 35 emphasis mine).
84

Baudrillard examines this concept of excess in two other examples of late capitalism: fashion
and Western gluttony. “It’s not the beautiful opposed to the ugly, it’s what’s more beautiful than
the beautiful. The obese – the famous fat American – is not opposed to the skinny one. He is
fatter than fat, and that is fascinating” (Baudrillard 1987, 99, emphasis mine).
85

Leon Anderson adds: “(The Japanese) don’t suffer from Western-style egocentrism, but rather
from ethnocentrism to a degree unknown in the West” (Anderson 1992, 14 emphasis mine).
86

I am specifically applying this concept to monsters used to critique capitalism during and
immediately following the Cold War period. Dynamic relationships with monsters are still used
to express concern over issues such as gender, race, and others. For more, see Tony Magistrale’s
Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Films (2005). Yet there is
evidence that even in horror films focusing on issues such as gender there is a phenomenon not
unrelated to “the Gizmo effect.” In one important example, Carol J. Clover views the breakdown
of gender binaries in slasher films from the 1980s, appearing in the same time frame as the
“Japan bashing” I’ve been examining. She writes, “If the project of these films is to update the
binaries, the upshot is a sex/gender swamp – of male and female bodies collapsing into one
another, of homo- and heterosexual stories tangled to the point of inextricability” (Clover, 107).
87

Theorists Alexandre Kojève and Giorgio Agamben have discussed Japan in this transition
away from older paradigms. Within what we have discussed as a formal degree of difference,
these theorists find a revised dichotomy that is still human but strictly formalistic (“snobbism”),
devoid of any perceived metaphysics. Therefore, the possibility opens for a framework beyond
228

the so-called End of History, one that would not be dependent on confrontation with monstrous
Others.
88

For more on the intersection between mythology and modernization in Japan, see Carol
Gluck’s Japan’s Modern Myths (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
89

Perhaps Kubrick’s The Shining and its surfeit of photographic images indicating a concrete
moment in History best exemplifies this Western tradition; Kubrick’s canonical work will
receive greater treatment in the second section of this chapter.
90

Ira Progoff analyzes the schism: “(Freud) regards society as a restraining and inhibiting factor
which fetters the individual… Jung calls for the reorientation of consciousness so as to develop
the intuitive faculties and to bring about a spiritually synthesizing experience rather than a
merely analytical understanding” (Progoff, 42; 50). According to Progoff, Freud refuses (and is
unable) to engage with society, opting instead to focus on individuals, while Jung hopes to
consider social meaning from a more holistic perspective.
91

Steven Jay Schneider’s introduction to Horror Film and Psychoanalysis contends
“psychoanalytic horror film theorizing need not be homogenizing or reductive” (Schneider, 12).
Schneider goes on to argue that perhaps “non-Western” film traditions do not require
psychoanalytic readings; it is just as probable, I argue in this chapter, that non-Western traditions
open up possibilities for a radical revision of the base assumptions underlying the readings in
question.
92

As Jung notes, “The intellect, of course, would like to arrogate to itself some scientific,
physical knowledge of the affair, or, preferably, to write the whole thing off as a violation of the
rules. But what a dreary world it would be if the rules were not violated sometimes!” (Jung 1963,
61).
93

Critic Stefan Tanaka proclaims that this breakdown is part and parcel of Japan’s intellectual
history. He analyzes pre-Meiji era appearances of the paranormal: “Ghosts became humans,
humans became ghosts. The past coexisted with the present; indeed, there was no separation.
Moreover, they were unpredictable” (Tanaka, 56). Atemporality was thus far from being purely a
symptom of the late twentieth century.
94

Theorist Gilles Deleuze recognizes this shared condition in the time-image of modern cinema.
He writes, “Time which is fundamentally liberated becomes power of the false” (Deleuze, 143).
This “power of the false” reveals to the spectator that their perceptions of Time are as specious
as reification on celluloid. The memories of another, when edited together with those of the Self,
offers an existential revelation: “The power of the false cannot be separated from an irreducible
multiplicity. ‘I is another’ [‘Je est un autre’] has replaced Ego = Ego” (133). This disjointedness
is particularly relevant in Shimizu’s Ju-On as it overlaps and disconnects the temporal
experiences of various individuals to reveal a disjointedness (and thus, interconnection) for the
spectator within their given community.
229

95

Deleuze, though he problematically fails to distinguish Japanese philosophy from some
mystical construction of Japanese nature, recognizes the contributions of Japanese cinema (in
particular, the films of Ozu) to a new contemplation of Time in film language, “connections of a
new type, which are no longer sensory-motor and which bring the emancipated senses into direct
relation with time and thought” (Deleuze, 17). Ozu, for Deleuze, reveals - through cinematic
form - that Time is “indefinite” while change is a finite product of man.
96

Dainin Katagiri, a Zen philosopher who played a prominent role in spreading Zen into
American life, reminds one that this process is unnerving and ideally representable through
tropes of fantasy or horror. Endless negation of the Ego amidst the chasm of eternity terrifies: “If
you try to stay with it you become crazy… they are going down into an unfathomable abyss…
they are scared because they seem to disappear… we try to escape, screaming and crying”
(Dainin, 50; 89).
97

Other prominent examples of cyberpunk fiction handling this subject matter include Pat
Cadigan’s Tea from an Empty Cup (2000) and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (2000).
98

This phenomenon is outlined at length in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of
Enlightenment. The omniscience of the Enlightenment, placing Reason over nature, creates the
certitude and the layered mythologies of Western metaphysics (from which one increasingly
cannot escape). The authors describe the condition as follows: “Pure reason became unreason, a
procedure as immune to errors as it was devoid of content” (Horkheimer, 71).
99

According to virtual media theorist Paul Virilio, any radical edge that metaphysics might once
have had is diluted by cinematic innovations: “What are we to say, then, of this dictatorship
exerted for more than half a century by optical hardware which has become omniscient and
omnipresent and which, like any totalitarian regime, encourages us to forget we are individuated
beings?” (Virilio, 29).
100

Adorno writes that “causality is the spell of dominated nature.” He finds the tipping point of
a “reductive schema” stemming from the Enlightenment to be when “man recognizes himself as
the object of his insatiable reductions” (Adorno, 269). Cinematic simulation, in his terms, is
symptomatic of how agency has been gradually replaced by a pre-determined process which
eliminates any “genuine freedom.”
101

Adorno argues that Heidegger assumes yet another false transcendence but is actually still
firmly rooted in Western metaphysics: “The philosophy of Being shares this ritual of repetition
with the mythos it would so much like to be” (Adorno, 115).
102

Tom Moylan, though electing not to discuss the portrayal of a digitized Far East, recognizes
the deployment of racialized Others (located in clusters or enclaves) and the concurrent reassertion of a status quo in cyberpunk fiction, particularly in the works of William Gibson: “Seen
in terms of this plot trajectory, the enclaves simply become the homes of very traditional
230

sidekicks, and the utopian agents become no more than typical Proppian helpers who are duly
employed at the standard three points in the narrative to advance the action of the main
characters” (Moylan, 88). He surmises that racial issues in these works serve the purpose of
being “little more than useful cogs in those larger machines” (91). Western metaphysics, in other
words, once more swallows cultural difference into its greater trajectory and embedded plot lines.
103

Prior to encountering the idoru, Laney is trained by a mysterious federal agency to conduct
“nodal apprehension” from a young age; “nodal apprehension” involves a mystical style of
reading someone’s consumption habits in order to apprehend the essence of the individual: “He
was an intuitive fisher of patterns of information… a dowser, a cybernetic water-witch” (Gibson,
26).
104

A recent film, Duncan Jones’ Source Code (2011), continues this tradition of examining
collective dreams and the subsequent problem of “waking”; others include Paul Verhoeven’s
Total Recall (1990) and Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995).
105

Masanori Oda posits, in The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture, “the subject of
Techno Orientalism, just as in the old Orientalism, is blind to the oppressed consciousness of the
observed objects that is hidden under the shadow of brightness of imagination” (Oda, 255).
106

For more on the connection between these two “soft power superpowers,” see Soft Power
Superpowers: Cultural and National Assets of Japan and the United States (Yasushi, 2008).
Essays in this collection demonstrate the complexity, and overlap, within the “soft power” of
these two cultures.
107

Perhaps the most apt example is Western perceptions of Nintendo as a kind of “soft power”
Trojan horse. Joseph Tobin critically defines this perspective: “Nintendo is an Althusserian
apparatus, sinister, powerful, and systematic in achieving its seduction and interpellation of its
child consumers” (Tobin, 8). David Sheff adds, “Even during the hours when kids weren’t
playing video games, they were being showered with the culture of Nintendo… Nintendo has
successfully entered the collective consciousness… Super Mario was more recognized by
American children than Mickey Mouse” (Scheff, 8 – 9).
108

Ian Buruma comments, “After centuries of having absorbed the cultures of China and the
West, Japan would now compel others to imbibe the culture of Japan… Japan had become a
distorted mirror image of the nation that tried so hard to shape it” (Buruma, 121; 152).
109

For examples of how American popular culture was applied in manipulative ways
internationally, see also Uta G. Poiger’s Jazz Rock and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American
Culture in a Divided Germany (Poiger, 2000).
110

Nolan, in a 2010 interview, recognizes this trend in his work: “I think the relationship
between movies and dreams is something that has always interested me… when you look at the
idea of being able to create a limitless world and use it as almost a playground for action and
231

adventure, I naturally gravitate towards cinematic worlds.” He goes on to point toward the
deepest level of the dream in Inception, a mise-en-scene he acknowledges as echoing the familiar
film language of the James Bond series. Dream-work, and the cinematic fantasies Nolan evokes,
proceed in tandem toward a similar goal: manipulation of the dreamer (Elfman, 2010).
111

James Chapman and Nicholas J. Cull point out that since 1945, “Hollywood became one of
the prime vehicles for the projection of U.S. imperialism” (Chapman, 9).
112

Slavoj Žižek recognizes a similar phenomenon in America in the years following the 2008
financial collapse, one in which the presumed determinism at the heart of global capitalism is
overcome through an illusory “waking,” revealing for Žižek a “wake” for the System in its
entirety: “The danger is thus that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one
which, instead of awakening us from a dream, will enable us to continue dreaming” (Žižek, 20
emphasis mine).

232

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233

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